I can see years of pain on her face and I almost, almost, want to lower my hands and let her take out her rage on me. I deserve it. I could have saved her even if I didn’t save myself.

‘I’m sorry,’ I blurt through my tears. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. He hurt me too, Heidi, he hurt me too!’

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Heidi

Now

‘He hurt me too.’ Ciara’s words cut through the noise. They cut through the thumping in my heart and the rush of blood through my veins. They cut through Lily’s crying. They cut through my anger and pain.

I hear them and immediately I freeze. I register their meaning. I stop, drop the hand that was in mid-flight to my side. My anger seeping from me, through my feet, through the floor, leaving as quickly as it arrived.

‘He hurt me too,’ she’d said again. It is enough to change everything.

I look at her. At the expression on her face. For the first time, I see the same pain in her eyes that I see in my own every time I look in the mirror. Even when I think I’m happy. Even when I think I have it sussed and when I think I’m finally ‘over it’. My eyes tell a different story.

Seeing Ciara now, the look on her face, I know she feels it, too. The pain, the betrayal, the hurt and the shame.

My arms are like lead weights. Ciara is crying now. Gulping lungfuls of air. Lily is still howling. It’s only the sharpness of her cry that forces me to move, to turn from Ciara and focus on the tiny child who needs me. The innocent baby.

My girl.

My precious little girl.

I could never have allowed him to hurt her, you see.

When she was born, everything I’d thought I’d pushed to the back of my mind about Joe and what he’d done came back. And with it came such a primal sense of needing to protect my daughter, I vowed to distance myself even further from Joe McKee.

And then he became sick and it all seemed as though karma was finally catching up with him. But it trapped me. No one would understand if I walked away from a dying man, but I’d rather have died myself than tell people what I’d endured. They’d never understand. I doubted they would even believe me. Joe was regarded so highly, and I was always regarded as a strange one, a misfit, the girl who was a bit ‘mad in the head’.

They’d never understand that it was more complicated than it ever appears in the movies. Mind games and manipulation. A destroyed sense of self. I had clung on to ‘love’ as twisted and as damaging as it was. I’d almost persuaded myself it had never happened. Until Lily was born. Until I woke up.

I’m aware of Ciara slumping to the floor behind me as I lift my baby and rock her to me. Hold her close and soothe her. Centre myself as she fusses. She’s hungry. Her physical need reminds me I need to be present.