'Where was your mother while this was happening?'
'She was there,' Kara said very quietly. 'She watched the whole thing.'
Roman was silent for several long moments. 'And she did nothing to try to stop your father?'
'She told me that I deserved everything I got,' Kara said tonelessly. 'She wouldn't look me in the eye after that, except once, when I first got home. She spat in my face, and told me that I was no longer her daughter.
'Then one day I found myself packed with a few belongings and locked in the back of a truck. I was taken to a sort of prison for women in Spain that was either part of or run by a convent. They told me it was a convent, but if it was, then I know nothing of convents.
'We were used as farm labourers, and were worked every day from dawn 'til dusk like animals. While we worked, we were watched by men riding on horseback who carried rifles. The men would do horrible things to the women, especially the pretty ones. I'm not sure exactly what they did to them, but at night we could sometimes hear them screaming.
'One woman, who spoke French, told me that I had better get out of there, and soon. My body and my face were healing from what my father had done, and the men were beginning to follow me with their eyes.
'Five of us escaped one night. A man who watched a side entrance and gate had been bribed, but he still took all our money before letting us out. We were no sooner out the gate when we heard a whistle, and knew that we had been betrayed; soon we could hear them coming after us.
'The girl who spoke French told us that we were done for if they caught us, so we ran straight for a nearby river and hid underneath a dock in the mud. Then we stole a boat, a big whaler with oars, and took turns raiding some gardens nearby.
'We almost got away scot-free, but one of the women . . . she was keeping watch for us as we filled a big basket full of corn and apples . . . the men saw her. She tried to run away, but they ran her down. The last I saw of her, the men had beaten her and drawn their knives, and were dragging her by the hair to a wood-shed . . .
'The remaining four of us met some English people our own age in France who paid us to take them across the channel to England. There was one girl, Maggie Finch, who talked me into coming with her and getting a job at a fish market on a London dock. She knew some people, she said. Well, Maggie was as good as her word. I soon had a new job and a new life.