Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

My husband, Mike, always bagged the window seat on planes,…

Chapter 2

Fighting the need to gag, I ushered everyone inside, pasting…

Chapter 3

When Mike and I returned to the living room the…

Chapter 4

It felt like the middle of the night when I…

Chapter 5

‘We come bearing gifts!’

Chapter 6

The type of fostering Mike and I had originally been…

Chapter 7

Finding out they were ‘in care’ upset the children dreadfully,…

Chapter 8

It was a Saturday afternoon, towards the end of September,…

Chapter 9

If I was frustrated by a lack of action on…

Chapter 10

The main finding Anna wanted to share with me concerned…

Chapter 11

The journey back home from Wales was a tense affair.

Chapter 12

I had decided, during one of many bouts of sleeplessness…

Chapter 13

It took Ashton some time to act normally around us…

Chapter 14

I didn’t have a clue how to turn things around…

Chapter 15

I called Anna the next morning. I felt helpless; I…

Chapter 16

‘You know what?’ Mike said to me the following evening,…

Chapter 17

I brooded about that meeting all week. After we’d left…

Chapter 18

It had been such a delight to see Justin. He…

Chapter 19

Only a couple of weeks after the birth of Olivia’s…

Chapter 20

I grew more convinced, with every passing day, that these…

Chapter 21

It wasn’t that I wanted to label the children –…

Chapter 22

Just as had happened at Christmas, Easter passed almost unnoticed…

Chapter 23

The call came from Anna just over a week later.

Chapter 24

It was agreed that we’d say goodbye to the children…

Epilogue

This letter takes pride of place underneath the photograph of…

Exclusive sample chapter

Acknowledgements