‘All right.’
We said goodbye and I replaced the receiver. Lucy and Paula were up now, and I could hear their voices and Joss’s as the three of them talked on the landing. When Lucy and Paula came down in their dressing gowns a short while later, they both looked very shocked.
‘Joss told you?’ I asked.
‘Yes. It’s awful. What a pervert Eric is,’ Lucy said.
‘He was supposed to be her new dad!’ Paula said, disgusted.
And for a moment an uncomfortable thought flashed across my mind that Joss might have told them for dramatic effect, which would have given credence to her mother’s assertion that she made things up for attention. But then we all handle trauma in different ways, and sharing it with her peers was probably Joss’s way of coping – now that it was out in the open, she felt comfortable telling others she trusted. Not for the first time, though, I worried about the effect all of this was having on my children. Paula had gone very pale.
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