“Yes,” I said.

She cried then. Properly, for a long time, in a way she does not do, and I held her at my own kitchen table, and it was the first time in twelve years that my daughter had been the one crying in that room.

She told her brothers on the Saturday. She asked me to be there and told me I wasn’t allowed to talk, which I did not enjoy and which was correct.

Noah took it badly.

He is twenty-one and he has built himself, deliberately and at great cost, on a foundation that says *Dad was right.* He has to. He spent seven years in trucks and cabins and fishing berths because a man told him it was the only way to keep his sister alive, and if that man was wrong, then Noah’s whole childhood was a thing that happened for no reason.

“He was protecting you,” Noah said. “That’s what leverage means. It means Michael wouldn’t touch you because he thought Dad would come back for you.”