I’m not sure what I expected. Perhaps a hug. Perhaps she would cry and tell me she was sorry something so awful happened to me. Perhaps she would offer to come with me to the police. Perhaps she would just understand.

Instead, I saw a look of disgust on her face. Maybe even disbelief. I can still see her now, dragging on her cigarette before dropping it and grinding it into the ground under one of her trendy ox-blood DM boots.

‘That’s really fucking serious, Ciara,’ she’d said, shaking her head.

I waited to see what she would follow it up with.

She’d simply shaken her head and walked away. I was left not knowing what I’d done wrong. Wondering if she thought it was my fault. Feeling like I was dirty and horrible all over again.

Jude kept her distance after that. Slowly but surely I was sidelined from her group, from my ‘tribe’ of so-called friends who drank on the Walls. I was too damaged even for society’s misfits.

I promised myself then that I’d never tell anyone again. And yet, I’d told Stella and the world hadn’t ended. Now I owed it to Heidi to tell her, too.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Ciara

Now

I’m nervous standing here, outside the house at Aberfoyle Crescent, waiting for Heidi to arrive, to discuss what happens next.

Like her, I now just want to get this all over and done with. I want the past put in the past. So much makes sense now that didn’t before.

I’m not sure how I’ll look her in the face when she arrives. I can feel my palms sweating, despite the biting cold. I don’t want to be back in this house at all. I can’t imagine how Heidi has kept coming here, kept facing her trauma over and over again. If it wasn’t for my mother and Kathleen badgering me to make sure they had access to Dad’s things, I’d have been happy never to come here again.

The house is icy, unwelcoming. No one has put any heating on in here in days and the temperature hasn’t taken its time to drop, cold and damp settling into the very fabric of the building. The big clock in the hall still ticks loudly. I can just hear the low hum of the fridge, but aside from that the house is silent.

I can feel it, though, for the first time. The badness of this place that gave Stella the creeps. I’d assumed she’d felt my pain, but it was possible much worse had happened here.

I see a picture of Natalie, a slightly older version of the woman Heidi has become, smile down from the wall. I wonder if I should’ve given Natalie more of a chance. For the two years she’d been in my life I’d treated her with nothing but absolute disdain. I’d hated her, although all she ever did was be kind to me. She was soft-spoken, like Heidi. Meek. Unaware of her own beauty. She’d try to engage with me, even when she was ill. Even when it was clear she was dying. I turned my back on her every time.