110. Now

Tinted BB cream, rose-pink lip balm, a flick of mascara. Maybe a dab of blusher. There. I tuck my greying hair behind my ears and smile at myself in the mirror, take a tissue to blot my lips and smile again, wider, to show my teeth, which aren't as white as they once were but so what?

I throw the tissue in the bin and walk back into the pub. Music thuds. Bodies sway and spin around me in the gloom, grinning, hands in the air.

I'm several decades older than the next-youngest person here, and never in my life have I been somewhere so small and sweaty, but I wouldn't miss it. I catch myself in the mirror above the bar – I can't stop smiling.

I worm through the crowd to the front, where Rose is arguing with Dan about something as they sip gin and tonics with a notable lack of fruit. Rose spots me and turns and grins, holding her arms open. She hugs me tight.

‘Your husband is saying we should stand further back so we don't freak her out, but we have to be here to support her!'

Dan shakes his head and widens his eyes at me. He's grasping two drinks and hands me one.

The compère, a girl in denim cut-offs and a glittery top, steps onto the low stage and grabs the mic. ‘Okay, everyone. Thanks for coming tonight. So it begins! Please welcome the talented, addictive, enigmatic PO?NG. Enjoy!' She skips off as Jenna and her bandmate Nils shuffle on behind her: Jenna at the back, Nils taking the mic and grinning into the bright lights. He's a tall, lanky Swedish boy with floppy hair and some choice facial tattoos.

It's their first gig outside of uni socials. They're the first of the supporting acts. Nils is definitely in love with my daughter, but Jenna denies it and Rose doesn't seem to mind. Jenna tried to get Rose to learn to sing, but it isn't one of Rose's many talents.

I didn't think a schoolgirl romance could last uni years, especially long-distance, but the pure sunshine brilliance of Rose and the dark, cool depths of my genius daughter just work somehow.

Rose has never quite forgiven herself for that day though. Jenna called her from the bathroom of Trevethan House and Rose cycled there immediately. She stepped out to wave in Lydia from the lane, take her upstairs, not realising her mother knew the house intimately. Not realising Georgia had parked in the garage and was eating a sandwich, gathering courage in the gloom. Once Rose had walked out of the house, out of the gate, Georgia slipped into the house as Rose waited in the hot sun.

Rose says she should never have left Jenna alone for a second, but I've told her it won't help to keep clinging to that guilt.

I watch Rose beaming at Jenna, her cheeks swollen with pride, and I wonder how Lydia, so bitter and intense, raised such a happy, straightforward daughter.

Lydia was struck off the nurse's register after her conviction. She should have sent Jenna to hospital the second she found her. She was negligent. And then everything else she did…

I went to see her when she was inside. She seemed more grounded and had found it hard to look me in the eye. She booked herself into The Priory when she got out.

‘Testing, testing,' says Nils into the mic, and there's a smattering of laughter. Jenna plays a chord on her keyboard, picks up her viola and retunes a string, places her hand on each instrument – twelve of them – arrayed on a grubby velvet throw, one after the other.

Jenna and I didn't just immediately bond into an inseparable mother–daughter pair. I tried, but she found it hard to open up, and it was difficult to break the lifetime habit of smiling over everything. And all of the court cases took up the best part of two years. My little stint in prison: that's what gave her the space to hear how much I wanted our relationship to be better.

And finally, she told me. The Bob Dylan concert, when Jenna was fourteen. Tristan had gone off for a dinner and let Theo take her on his own.

Theo had put his arm around her and she had been flattered and excited, and when they'd got back to the Pimlico hotel, he'd kissed her. She had tried to kiss back – it was her first kiss – but then she'd tried to push him off, and he'd kept going until she managed to writhe away.

She said he'd slid his hand down the back of her trousers and whispered something so vile she couldn't repeat it. The thought of it made me sick.

‘It was nothing really,' she said.

And I realised that if it had happened to someone else, and I'd been told a few years earlier, I would've agreed.

I held her tight, waited till our breathing synced.

She had been missing that night for eight hours and I hadn't even known it. She had wandered around, over the bridge – a fourteen-year-old country bumpkin lost in the dark in South London – and then sat on the hotel's front steps till morning.

She said when they'd got home, she had tried to talk to me, but I don't remember anything other than her staying home from school with an upset stomach.

Theo had played it safer after that. He did everything he could to make it up to her, to woo her, and Tristan had assisted. My brother helped orchestrate time alone for them. He bought the ruby necklace. Because Theo was so invaluable to him. And Theo knew all his secrets.

Jenna said that Theo and Rose were the only people who had made her feel good about herself. And he was hot. And she'd thought the family would consider Theo more acceptable than Rose. And she'd tried to convince herself she wasn't scared of him.

A man twice her age, a man who'd sexually assaulted her when she was underage, was more acceptable than her best friend?

I've hung her spider maquette in our new living room, to remind me.

It'll be a long time before Theo gets out of prison.

Tristan…

I've read all of Mina's interviews and we go for lunch sometimes. I don't know if she's right about him.

When I went to visit him, he asked me if I really thought he'd ever done anything wrong. When I said yes, he laughed. I started to talk about the things I was working through in therapy, our childhood, and he looked at me like I was a stranger.

‘Father could be a bully sometimes, but he was never abusive, Frankie. What are you talking about? He had rules. There was a code of conduct. When you're as busy – as important – as a man like our father, I think it's fair to demand order and calm and a little bit of iron core from your family, don't you? And our mother – sometimes I wonder if she was a masochist. But actually I just think she isn't very clever. And she never knew how to take a joke.'

And then he frowned. ‘And she's the twisted one, really, Frankie, isn't she? Because she beat a woman half to death and let her son believe it was him.'

Ash and Ava will never be best friends with Jenna. But they've apologised and sometimes they go for a drink.

I visit my mother once a month. We thought her lawyer would be able to get her a lighter sentence, because she didn't actually kill Miss Smith, or not irreversibly, and because of the situation with my father. But the brutality on that tape was hard to stomach, and she has never been able to fully see my father for the monster that he is – she couldn't stand in front of a jury and call herself a victim. She still has eight years left.

I've been thinking about visiting her less. I've been wondering how such an intelligent woman allowed herself and her children to remain in the home of such a toxic man. Even accepting that she was damaged and depressed, acknowledging her tunnel vision, we all have a responsibility to our children.

That day, Dan had come to London for a series of meetings with Transport for London, to set up an agreement to farm their unused land around train stations. It turned out he'd been wanting to get out of Shorthorn Lodge for some time, thinking it would be good for me and Jenna. He'd got me meetings with three galleries. He hadn't told me because he knew how tied I was to Shorthorn Lodge; he'd known that if he didn't have everything lined up just right, I'd find a way to say no.

Since we moved here after I got out of prison, I've had a lot of therapy. I think I've learned to be comfortable with myself, and to seek reality over fantasy.

I think of my father at Shorthorn Lodge, walking the empty halls, taking calls between dust-sheets even though he's meant to be retired. He won't have moved back in there. He'll have stayed in his conversion with his underfloor heating and triple glazing and absence of the ghosts of his parents.

I wonder if there's a way to stop my skin from crawling as it does every time his bald head pops into my mind. I think of Georgia, wriggling the fingers that strangled her own father at me, and my own start to itch.

I down the rest of my gin and tonic and squeeze closer to Dan. Jenna begins to play the harmonica, a low, sliding drone, and my heart tugs. As she plays, she sets up a repeating melody on her keyboard and then starts tapping the foot pedal of a drum.

She has let her hair grow long again and a strand falls in her face. She flicks it away as she drops the harmonica and picks up her drumsticks and Nils takes a breath. Beside me, Rose and Dan whoop.

The sadness of her music hurts, but I've learned to listen.

I've talked to my therapist so many times about the sheer number of people doing the wrong thing that created our situation. She wouldn't be drawn, but my theory is simple: damaged people make more damaged people and find kindred spirits.

Georgia said something like that to me at the end of my visit. And also this: ‘Some people deserve to die.'

I'm not sure ‘deserve' is quite right. But I think she might be onto something there, mightn't she?