He hands me a thick sheaf of documents.
"We called this the meat chart," Glen Townsend says dryly.
Leafing though it, my eyes begin to blur. Each page contains dozens upon dozens of names, each with an amount next to it ranging from $1,500 to a staggering $120,000.
Say hello to one of the most shameful chronicles in the history of Nova Scotia.
Here are the names of 1,500 young people who claimed to have been physically and sexually abused at institutions like the former Shelburne School for Boys and the Nova Scotia School for Girls in Truro. These are the people who, without any substantiation and with the province’s encouragement, pointed the finger at hundreds of staff workers and convinced the rest of us that there was an epidemic of pedophilia happening in our midst.
Before the insanity ceased, the province had thrown almost $30 million in compensation at these young people, a figure that doesn’t even include millions more in fees for their lawyers.
Glen, 70, was one of those accused. Before his retirement, he was a senior supervisor at the Shelburne school and faced 115 accusations of physical and sexual abuse.
He puts the pages back in his file and sighs. "One kid, he was a little kid, we protected him," he tells me. "He put in for $90,000 and got $96,000!"
Glen and the other staffers have never had their day in court. Instead, they endured a dozen years under a cloud of public suspicion before the allegations were discredited and dropped. Subsequently, the province has officially apologized, offering compensation to many of the wrongfully accused.
Glen wrote to me, expressing how he felt about the hell he’s still going through.
"If they gave me $100 million," he said in his letter, "it would not help. I know I am damaged for life."
As someone who had been willing to believe the worst of him and his peers, that hit me hard. So hard, in fact, that I invited myself down to his home at Welshtown Lake, near Shelburne, to hear of his torture first-hand.
Glen shows me letters of commendation he received over the years, written by various senior government officials and even a premier. He points to photos of himself coaching young inmates in hockey and baseball.
I stare at all the smiling young faces. "How are those kids doing now?" I ask.
He shrugs. "Most of the ones I knew are in prison," he replies. "Some are dead."
Glen is still incredulous that so many allegations of abuse were believed by the rest of us.
"If it was all true," he reasons, "all the staff would’ve been sex offenders!"
He refers me back to the meat chart. How could so much alleged abuse have been kept quiet for so long?
"The superintendents I know wouldn’t stand for it," he assures me.
He says he never beat or kicked a child, never even so much as swore at them or called them names.
"I treated them as good as I could," he says. "I was fair with them and honest with them."
It didn’t matter. Once fingers were pointed, he and his peers found their lives shattered. In Glen’s case, the trauma was so insidious, he wouldn’t even allow his granddaughter onto his lap because he felt so uneasy.
He cut back on unnecessary outings and avoided friends. It’s still that way today.
"It’s been a tough 12 years," he allows, "and the sad part is, what would closure mean?"
Would it put an end to the sleepless nights, the cold sweats and bad dreams? Would it make up for the fact he’s on antidepressants, suffers from high blood pressure and mood swings?
And what about those thoughts he’s had of suicide?
Glen tells me he loved working at the Shelburne school. If it was still open, he’d go back in a heartbeat.
"You’re kidding!" I exclaim. "After what those monsters have put you through, you’d go back?"
"I don’t blame the kids," he retorts. "Some of those kids, I thought the world of. Still do."
Glen feels the youngsters simply jumped on a lucrative bandwagon that came their way.
He blames the system itself and he’s still very, very angry about the process by which provincial officials handled things. "They went in secret, behind our backs, and it exploded on them."
He’s frustrated by the fact those responsible will never be named and shamed because, with all charges dropped, there won’t be any criminal court cases.
Glen and I spend a long, difficult morning together. As we’re making our goodbyes, he looks me in the eye.
"Do you believe me?" he asks quietly.
I shake his hand. "I do," I reply.
What I don’t tell him is just how bad I feel for taking this long to stand up and say it.