I feel shaky. This is a conversation I suppose I need to have, but don’t want to.

‘What was he like, Heidi? I mean, what was he really like?’

Alex’s eyes are on me now, looking into my eyes. And there’s this place inside of me that is so filled with pain and so in need of healing that I almost tell him. I almost explain how Joe hurt me. Abused me. Raped me. Yes, raped me. That word – that experience. How he messed up every sense in my head of what love and family meant. How he broke me and then couldn’t understand why I was broken. It’s the same place that wants me to stand up and applaud that he is dead.

But I see sadness in my husband’s eyes, and fear. It strikes me that maybe, just maybe, he thinks I was the person who left the unexplained marks. That he should have seen it coming. And once he thinks that, and once people start looking – because they will start looking, and they will find out just what happened on that Christmas ten years ago – they will conclude, without question, that I killed Joe McKee.

I’m the most likely suspect. And it terrifies me to consider that my husband may realise this.

I keep Alex’s gaze. ‘He didn’t know how to be a father. Not to Ciara and not to me. He was cruel and selfish. I’d have been better off in care than in this house. It breaks me to think things would’ve been so different if only my grandparents had been well enough to take care of me. Or if my mother had known what he was really like before she died.

‘They were together two years and he never dropped his perfect persona with her. It was only after she died that he showed himself for what he was. It destroys me that she trusted him to take care of me. It even made me really angry with her for a long time. I wondered how could she have been so blind and so irresponsible? And then I was angry with my grandparents for not taking me in anyway. Even with their problems. I’m not saying I was perfect, Alex. I was an angry teenager. Mixed up. But he? He was evil.’

Alex nods. I can see his eyes fill with unshed tears. I’ve said more to him than I ever have before. Before I’d just say we were never close. That we never really bonded. That Joe was strict and, at times, controlling. All of which had been true. And it had been enough for him not to question me when I told him I preferred a wedding away on a beach in Italy, just the two of us and some friends. That I had no need to have a father figure walk me down the aisle. That I made my duty visits to Joe, but no more. Until he became sick and it all changed.