what he’d done to me, and my heart hardened again.
Unfaithful? Over and over again? Like father, like son, I thought bitterly, and I stayed where I was. The sooner it was over, the sooner I could get him out of there.
‘It went on for years, Gemma. And you know what the worst thing was? We put up with it, both of us. Me and mum. When Liam was born – and God knows how that happened, but I don’t want to think about that – I felt sick for weeks, sick scared that Dad would move onto him next. But he never did. I never knew why, but he never did. Liam was special, in more ways than one, and the fact that my father never laid a hand on him in anger is the one redeeming feature of his whole sick, twisted life. But he carried on, same old same old, with me and Mum, and we carried on putting up with it. And to this day I don’t really know why, you know? It was like he had this … this power over us. We never told anyone, we never reported him. We blamed our injuries on accidents, on falls, if anyone ever asked, though God knows why anyone believed us, we’d need to have been falling over every second day to account for the number of bruises we both had all the time. Maybe it was partly because we were ashamed I suppose, ashamed of what our lives were like when all around us everyone else seemed normal, happy. But mostly, we were scared. Scared of him, scared of what he’d do to us if we fought back, if we stood up to him. We let him carry on, and we did nothing. We did absolutely feckin’ nothing.’
He punched the table, hard, his face flushing with anger, and another wave of sympathy rushed over me. Poor Danny, I thought. And poor Bridget too, still so angry at everyone and everything. What a life she must have lived.
Danny was still talking, engrossed in his story.
‘I left as soon as I could, when I was eighteen and went off to university. But even then, even though I was big and strong enough by then to fight back, to defend my mother against him too, I still didn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to. It was as if after a lifetime of it, he had this … this hold, over both of us. We never fought back, we never told. Well, except Quinn.’
He paused for a moment, rubbing a hand across his face.
‘He didn’t know all of it, not how constant it was, how bad it was, not back in those days. He knows more now. But he walked in one day, came round unexpectedly, when Dad was laying into Mum, and I’ll never forget his face, Gemma. I’ll never forget how shocked he was when he saw the blood, saw how viciously Dad was punching her. Dad didn’t know he was there, which was probably lucky for him, and I begged him not to tell anyone, told him Dad would kill him and us if he did. And so he kept the secret. He’s had my back ever since we were kids, that lad. I looked after him too, you know? He probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for me, but that’s a story for another day. But he’d do anything for me, Quinn. Always would. Still would.’
I know that story, I thought. And that’s why Quinn lied through his teeth to the police about me. You saved his life, and he’d have done anything to protect you.
The bitterness was back. Why was he telling me all this? Yes, it was awful, horrendous. But all this was in the past. He’d moved on, made a new life for himself in London. What did this have to do with anything now?
‘And so he kept the secret too, as I said.’ Danny was saying. ‘We all kept the secret. I’d got so used to hiding it, as a kid, it became second nature. And when I grew up, and moved over here, there didn’t seem any point in telling anyone about it at all, so I never did. Except it was still there, inside, you know? A lot of the time I could forget about it, but it never really goes away, something like that. And I suppose it … it festered. The knowledge that I could have