‘You have to leave. Now.’ There’s a cold authority behind this voice; a strong local accent, and also stubbornness. She’s a young adult, maybe very early twenties, I think and one who sounds like she’s used to getting her own way.

For a moment I’m stunned. I imagined many scenarios but not this. ‘I don’t mean you any harm if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m on my own.’ She doesn’t say anything. I look around and realise that I’d guessed right, it’s clearly a working farm. Although not impossible, perhaps there are more – and hopefully more helpful – members of the family around somewhere. ‘If your parents are in, would you ask them to come to the door?’ For some reason I think of my grandmother and lift my chin a little. ‘Please.’

My maternal grandmother told my mum to hold her head up high in the dock. She told my mum to be fearless – to meet each and every juror’s eye when she told them what my father did to her. She kept a steady gaze as she told them about the nightly beatings – she never faltered. I saw that gleam of pride in my grandmother’s eye when she told me, years later. We both knew by then that my mother was wrong to be so bold: she’d expected to be acquitted, but she wasn’t. Looking unbeaten probably went against her. But I still saw my grandmother’s look of pride and I wondered then, and I wonder now, what sparked it. My family’s name was forever tarnished and my father’s murder forever shaped my life in ways that neither she nor I would’ve wanted.

But, then, standing on this doorstep, I suddenly thought of something I hadn’t considered before. Perhaps, when that knife slid stealthily, steadily, into my father’s neck while he was sleeping, there might have been a bit of my grandmother who approved of my father’s murder and would’ve chosen to have driven the knife in herself, perhaps even deeper, pinning him like a butterfly to his pillow as he slept.

My plea, or perhaps her curiosity, draws her out a little from the doorway. ‘Oh!’ she says when she sees me, then again: ‘Oh!’

I’m aware of what I must look like. I’m standing in socks, and I’m holding my hands up high either side of me, at right angles to my body just like a newborn keeps its hands up either side of its head as it sleeps. As I crossed the fields, it helped reduce the pounding in my wrists. Now, I realised, it looked as if I was showing her the damage, wrists up and turned towards her, as if wanting her to see the red, exposed flesh.