He looked pathetic. He looked scared and I revelled in it. He deserved to look scared. He wouldn’t get any sympathy from me for it. But he was right that it would destroy my mother, who, despite her unending loyalty to my father, would have been the first person to drag him to the police if only she’d known.

But her heart had been so hurt. She had been so broken I hadn’t wanted to break it further when he left. I’d known even then that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.

I looked at him, at his wringing of his hands, his hoping for a way to escape from that room. But he couldn’t. His legs were too weak. There was nowhere to run and this time I could set the rules.

‘You can start to make it right,’ I told him.

‘How? Tell me how.’

I looked around the room, looking for inspiration. I saw the leather diary and pen on his bed.

‘Write it down,’ I told him.

‘What? You can’t be serious.’

‘I’m very serious. Write it down. Confess to it. Write it on a page in that diary. Write that you are sorry. Write that you are twisted man. Tell them you hurt me.’

‘But your mother …’ he said, his face contorting with grief at the thought of having to ‘out’ himself.

‘I won’t show her. Unless I have to. That’s up to you, you can be the one who decides whether I have to or not, but I want it there just in case. And I want, no I need, for you to admit it.’

I could feel my composure start to crumble. All I had wanted, for so long, for the past twenty years, more than anything, was for him to say sorry. For him to admit he had damaged me so badly that I didn’t know what it was like to really care for someone, to love them in an un-abusive fashion. That I had wept buckets of tears for the girl who begged her abusive father to come back because that’s what she equated with love.

‘I can’t do that, love,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Don’t make me!’ he pleaded.

I brushed away a tear that was threatening to fall, only to find another followed it.

Still, I took another deep breath.

‘You can, if you don’t want me to march downstairs right now and tell them all,’ I said as firmly as my voice would allow.

‘Ciara,’ he implored.

‘You want to make it right? Then make it right,’ I told him.

Then I watched as he put pen to paper, in the back of his leather-bound diary, and wrote the confession, and the apology, I had been waiting for all my life.

‘If you ever loved me at all,’ he said when he was done, ‘you’ll burn this diary when I’m gone. I’ve made mistakes, but no one else needs to be hurt by them.’