And I remembered sharply why I had attempted suicide that night. I looked over the scars on my arms. I felt exactly like I did when I pressed a broken shard of glass into my skin. Cut loose. Completely and utterly bewildered about what I was going to do with my life. Like an utter failure, who didn’t deserve to live.

At fourteen I was back in foster care – this time Mum had phoned the council while I was at school one day and said she hadn’t enough money to feed me. To be honest I think she just got sick of me being around, now that she had a new boyfriend. So off to a foster family I went. I fell pregnant within a month of being there to one of the other foster kids. He was about sixteen, maybe seventeen, and the first boy I ever slept with. He had moved out before I even knew why I was puking into the toilet every time a smell – shampoo, bread, the wind – brushed past my nose.

Once I started to show, it was decided fairly quickly that the baby would be put up for adoption. I don’t think this was my idea, but I didn’t disagree – I had no ability whatsoever to care for a child. Losing my virginity had been horrible, and pregnancy was basically nine months of puking, so I had no romantic ideals about what motherhood might involve. Gemma – my foster mother – held my hand during the delivery and said I could spend a few hours with the baby until the social workers came.

I called her Mia. I knew it wouldn’t go on the birth certificate, and the adoptive parents would choose her real name, but to me, she was Mia. Mine. She was so tiny – barely six pounds – but so beautiful and peaceful, and I was stunned, absolutely stunned that something so special could come from me. I had never imagined she would be so exquisite, that her little hands would be miniature copies of mine, that her skin would smell so gorgeous. She had a lick of shiny black hair on her crown and the longest eyelashes, curled up like a doll’s. Somehow it felt like I had always known her, and that she knew me.

It broke my heart when they came for her. The only reason I let them take her away was because I knew she’d be much, much better off with a family.