Caroline Darian relives the moment she discovered that she was also a victim of her father
– did he abuse me?’: an exclusive extract from the memoir of Dominique Pelicot’s daughterenter my parents’ house, draw in the familiar smells, drop off my bag in the room with the violet colour scheme where I always slept with my husband and son, walk past the family photos in the corridors, glance at my father’s paintings, one of them a female nude. Each step is like a station of the cross. All of my memories of this place – once so comforting, so joyful – are tainted now.
My parents thought that this would be the perfect haven for their retirement. It had pale-blue shutters, a sheltered garden with a suntrap corner, a pool just deep enough for my mother, extensive flowerbeds that my father fussed over obsessively, a gravel walkway lined with elegant lights, a wide-spreading mulberry tree, tall pink laurels, and an olive tree that we had given them to mark my son Tom’s birth.
I can’t help feeling that he’s holding something back. And that, whatever it is, it can’t be good. As casually as I can, I ask if I couldn’t pick everything up the next day, given how late it is. But, no, my instinct was right. He tells me he has something he needs to show me, something that concerns me directly. Trembling, I end the call and mechanically pick up the car keys and my handbag.
One of the officers tries to calm me. “You can handle this,” he tells me. I only have to look at two photos. All they want to know is if I’m in either of them.
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