I lower myself to the floor and bring Lily to my chest. She quiets as she starts to feed.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ciara says. ‘I’m sorry for everything. For what I said. Or didn’t say. I’m right, aren’t I? He hurt you.’

I nod, a teardrop plopping onto Lily’s soft hair. It all seems so sad.

‘If I’d spoken up, maybe, just maybe …’

I can’t speak.

She shakes her head. ‘I blocked it out,’ she says. ‘I didn’t allow myself to think about it. I was so angry. It was so messed up. For years, I thought it was normal. He made me believe what we did, no … what he did to me … was normal.

‘When you were ill …’ Ciara blinks at me. ‘Back when you were young, how you behaved, I should’ve known it was about more than your mother dying. But I swear I didn’t. I don’t think I wanted to see it. He told me I was his special girl, you see. His favourite.’ Her voice cracks and she puts her hand to her mouth as if she might throw up.

‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘I know you mightn’t believe this, but it was only when I spoke to Stella last night and she said …’ She pauses.

I can’t speak.

‘She asked me did I think he hurt you, too. I knew straight away he had. I felt it there and then. So much of what happened when we young just clicked into place.’

She is crying. Her fierce, cool, at times vicious exterior has been replaced with a vulnerability I’ve never seen in her before. Not when she was fourteen and screaming at me that she hated me. Not when she didn’t realise I’d heard her beg her daddy to come back.

‘I was so awful to you, Heidi. So awful. Even now, as a grown up. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but you must know I’m really sorry. More sorry than I can ever say.’

There is such desperation in her voice, it’s heartbreaking.

‘I’d have said something if I’d known. I think I would’ve said something.’

‘I believe you,’ I say, my body sagging but also knowing it was always more complicated than that. It was never as easy as just saying something. Just telling someone.

Ciara nods. We are both utterly exposed to each other for the first time.

‘You’ve not told Alex, have you?’ she eventually says.

I shake my head. ‘I haven’t told anyone. I was too ashamed and then I didn’t want people, especially Alex, to look at me like I was damaged goods.’

‘I know,’ she says, because she really does know.

She knows exactly what this feeling is like.

‘He told me no one else wanted me,’ I tell her, feeling strange to say the words out loud for the first time. ‘I had no one. Everyone thought I wasn’t right, you know? Too much trouble. He told me he was the only person who loved me and he was the only person who would take care of me. He told me bad things happened to children in care and that’s where I would end up.’