The chance encounter with a man at bar that shattered a 30-year secret - and saw a woman take back control

Sat in a bar with a friend, a woman orders a drink and settles in for a chat. She glances around the room, her eyes drifting to the door.

A man walks in. She's not seen him for more than 30 years.

The woman starts to sob. Her friend asks if she wants to leave. She says no - she has something she needs to say to him.

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She taps him on the shoulder. The man looks her up and down. "Do you know who I am?," she asks, fighting back tears.

"You raped me when I was 14." In that moment, she set on a path that would see the man who destroyed her teenage years finally face justice.

In that moment, she took back control.

The woman, now a mum, was raped by Nicholas Caro when she was 14. She asked not to be named in this story.

She says that fear and and shame forced her to keep her horrific ordeal to herself all those years.

But, following that chance encounter, and after finding the strength to confront her attacker, she went to the police. Now Caro is behind bars, and the Stockport mother is moving on, buoyed by a sense of closure.

The woman, speaking to the Manchester Evening News , said the burden of living with the traumatic secret for more than three decades - never uttering a word to her family - took its toll.

"I just hid it," she said. "I never spoke about it. I felt like I was living a lie."

She met Caro, now 51, as a teenager at a sports club. "I was a tomboy then," she added.

"He always used to come and talk to me. He just befriended me on the quiet, really."

Caro, she said, asked her to go for a drive with him one Saturday afternoon. "Being naïve, I went," the woman said.

"He picked me up, I didn't tell my mum. Then he drove