She heard only two words that the judge said,
"Eight years."
She looked at the woman in the dock, her face showed no emotion as she just stared straight ahead.
As the words sank in, Carla slumped down into the hard seat of the public gallery in Manchester Crown Court. Her body shook violently as she was overcome with uncontrollable and heart-wrenching sobs. Peter, her fiancé and Michelle, her best friend who had helped her through the last couple of horrendous years took her by the arms and supported her weight as they led her out of the court room.
As they entered the foyer, Carla collapsed onto one of the benches. A whirlwind of emotions raged through her already fragile mind. She was relieved that the two people responsible for stealing her childhood had been brought to justice, and would be spending the next few years of their lives behind bars. But she was also wracked with guilt: because the woman with the long dark hair, the woman who had just been sentenced to eight years in prison, was her mother. And Carla had been the main witness against her; she was the person responsible for putting her in that dock.
It had been a hard, tedious and painful journey to that courtroom; it started the moment Carla was born. It was everything Carla had been through at the hands of the woman who should have loved her unconditionally, the one person who Carla should have been able to turn to for comfort.
It had taken many years before Carla had felt ready to confront her past, and all its tormenting memories that had plagued her her whole life. But even Carla knew that she wouldn't have been strong enough to see it through, to see her abusers brought to justice, had it not been for all the help and support of her fiancé, Peter. He gave her the courage she desperately needed to fight her demons.
And that is how she came to face her mother, whom she still loved, despite everything, across a courtroom.
Whenever Carla would hear the local folk gossiping about the horrors of her childhood – something she had never wanted anyone to know about, never mind use as a means to pass time – she would often hear them question in disbelief,
"How could a mother do that to her own child?"
Carla found it to be a question she had asked herself so many times over the years, ever since she grew old enough to understand what had happened to her, and that what had happened was wrong. It frustrated her to no-end that she couldn't find an answer to that question. But she soon realised that some things were simply past understanding.
As from today, her mother, Sharon Donovan would be in prison, and Carla, for the first time in her life, was free.