I was prepared to wait for forgiveness. I’ve been very patient, but time is running out and now I think there’s a cruelty to them that they aren’t prepared to let go of.

How do they not see how hard it was for me, too? How it ate me up inside? Because it did. I hated myself for years. It almost destroyed me, almost drove me to suicide.

I was a victim, too. I didn’t ask to be born this way.

I wasn’t perfect. I did so much for them that they will never bring themselves to acknowledge.

The selfish, spoiled little bitches.

Chapter Fifteen

Ciara

Now

Auntie Kathleen is far changed from the confident, fashion-conscious, funky auntie who I hero-worshipped through my childhood and into my teen years.

Looking at her from across the living room in my father’s house, I feel shocked at her distinctly middle-aged appearance. She can’t be any older than her mid to late forties, but she dresses like someone in their late fifties or sixties. Gone are the short skirts, the big hair, the coloured tights and bright make-up. Instead, a woman with the same salt-and-pepper hair as my father sits in sensible black trousers, a pale pink jumper over a crisp white blouse and black shoes, which owe more to comfort than style, on her feet. The only jewellery she wears is a pair of pearl stud earrings and her plain gold wedding band. She wears no make-up and I can’t help but notice that her eyebrows could use a good reshaping.

She’s smaller, too, than I remember. A remnant of the person she was, or am I just remembering it all wrong? Sometimes I don’t know what I remember any more.

She looked lost when she arrived at the airport. I’d gone to pick her up and had been waiting for her at arrivals, when I saw this rather wretched-looking creature walk through the security doors blinking as she glanced around. She looked pale, tired and old, and she’d promptly burst into tears when she saw me.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she’d said over and over, to the point where I wanted to scream at her to stop talking.

She was quieter in the car, lost in her thoughts for a while. Then she asked about me. About Mum. About Heidi. How she was coping.

‘She is okay, isn’t she?’ Kathleen asked. ‘You know, stable?’

‘She seems to be,’ I said, which was the truth. I don’t think I was ignoring any warning signs just because it suited me to have Heidi doing the lion’s share of looking after Joe.

‘Because we have to be careful,’ Kathleen said. ‘You know she’s fragile.’

Yes, I knew Heidi was fragile. Everyone kept reminding me, not that I needed telling. For a year or so when she was a teenager our entire existence had revolved around ‘poor Heidi’ and her fragility.

‘She’s a different person now,’ I said, as if I knew her well enough to comment authoritatively on her mental wellbeing. ‘Her husband seems to be lovely and she’s focusing on her baby.’