Saying the words hurt. Bad things had been happening to me then anyway.

Ciara drops her head in her hands. ‘I told you those things too. If I’d known … Oh God, I made it so awful for you. I know it’s no excuse, but I was hurting so much. It was so fucked up. He told me I was his special girl,’ she sniffs. ‘That what he did, what he made me do, was how people showed each other how much they loved each other.’

‘God, when I think about it now, I was so stupid. So naive,’ I say.

Ciara pushes her hair back from her face, shakes her head. ‘We were children, Heidi. We weren’t stupid. We were scared, vulnerable children. And the only way I knew how to communicate with people was to hurt them,’ she says, wiping her eyes, then nose, with the back of her sleeve.

She pulls her knees to her chest and she looks, for all intents and purposes, like the truculent fourteen-year-old again I remember from all those years ago.

I realise we’ve both been trapped in time – stuck in an awful place of shame and hurt for so long that we never got the chance to grow up normally.

‘I don’t blame you,’ she says eventually, and I blink back at her. ‘I think you were brave. I’m jealous, almost.’

She must register the confusion on my face.

‘For what you did,’ she says. ‘I’m not angry. I wish I’d had the nerve to do it myself.’

I blink, tense. ‘What I did?’ I ask.

‘To him. To Joe. You killed him. It was you, wasn’t it?’

I stare at her. I can’t find the words – this is all moving on to a place I was not prepared for.

‘I mean, I get it now, I understand. God, anyone would understand,’ she says, her voice growing in confidence. ‘And I’ll help you in whatever way I can. We can tell the police, together, both of us. We can tell them how sick he was, and I mean in the head. What he did. How he manipulated us. What he took from us. They’ll understand. If we both tell them. They’ll have to take it all into consideration. Trauma and all that.’

I shake my head again. She really thinks I was the one to suffocate the life out of Joe.

‘But, Ciara. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me,’ I say.

She blinks at me. ‘You can trust me,’ she says, more urgency in her voice. ‘I’m on your side now. I understand.’ She sniffs. ‘The pressure you must have been under. Being in this house. Being around him all that time. No one – no one in the world would blame you. I don’t think you have to be scared,’ she says. ‘Once the police know what he put you through, what he put us through …’

She’s repeating herself. Rambling. Becoming manic. Breaking just as I had broken.