I picture the little blonde girl with ruddy cheeks who I’d last seen as I tucked her into bed in our foster home a couple of months after our mother’s death. Her eyes had grown heavy as I read her a bedtime story, desperate to play mom because I was the nearest she’d ever have.

‘You’ll still be here tomorrow, won’t you?’ she asked, like she did every night, just before she fell asleep.

‘I’ll never leave you,’ I’d promised as I stroked her hair.

The very next morning, she’d gone, with only the pink bunny rabbit she couldn’t be without left on her pillow. I was terrified that she’d screamed for me as she was dragged away, and that I had been in too deep a slumber to hear her.

‘She’s gone to her forever home,’ my carer told me casually over breakfast.

‘But why haven’t I gone with her?’ I asked.

‘You’ll never find a forever home,’ she’d said cruelly. ‘Nobody wants a thirteen-year-old.’

And she was right, as after being in the system for over a year, I was still being passed from pillar to post. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Meryl taking me in, just as soon as she recovered from the stroke that she swears my father had caused by snuffing out her baby sister’s life so violently, I dread to think what would have become of me.

It was too late to save Jennifer though.

Just as soon as I was old enough, I immediately set about trying to find her, desperate to have my sister back with me, where she belonged. But every door I knocked on was slammed noisily in my face. ‘She’s a minor.’ ‘She’s happy and settled.’ ‘She has all the family she needs,’ were the resounding words of social services.

So why did she turn up at Aunt Meryl’s as soon as she turned eighteen to find the family she’d lost?

By then, my ‘happy and settled’ sister had become a drug addict, who had left her adoptive home and was in and out of trouble with the law. She was also looking for someone to blame.

‘She abandoned me,’ she’d spat, when Aunt Meryl told her I had gone to live in England. ‘She promised she would never leave me then, and now she’s done it all over again.’

Could she not see I had my own demons that I needed to silence? That I’d had no choice but to get away from the grief and shame that clouded my every moment in New York. Grief for the mother and sister I’d loved and lost. Shame that I’d not been able to save them.