On the day of her fourteenth birthday, I woke with a pain in my chest. It was a physical pain, but there was something beneath it. Terror. Mia had turned the age I was when I gave birth to her. About a year earlier, my mother had blurted out that Mia was never put up for adoption. She was put immediately into foster care. The horror of this burrowed deeper and deeper into me until I thought it would consume me. I fell pregnant because I was in foster care – I only slept with that boy because I wanted someone to like me, to hold me. And I had been beaten, shamed, starved, and abused while in foster care; this was doubtless the same fate that Mia had endured. When I had given her over to the social worker with big glasses and frizzy hair, I had done so in blind faith that Mia was headed for a much better life than I had had. And when it dawned on me that, no, her life was a repetition of mine, a horrible echo, a fate to which I had abandoned her, exactly like my own mother had abandoned me, I couldn’t bear it.

That was the night I tried to kill myself. I had never told anyone about Mia. Not a soul.

And yet, I was glad I had survived. If I hadn’t, I would never have met Gaia and Coco. And I would never have known the love of small children, those two smiley, utterly mental girls, who I had somehow managed to care for all these months.

Maybe I wasn’t completely useless after all.

I was in the loo when the phone rang.

My phone, I mean. It was charging at the wall socket in the playroom after Gaia and I had been watching a YouTube video about how fjords were formed. I had popped out of the playroom for two minutes when the phone rang, shrill and loud throughout the playroom. Coco waddled over to it and bashed the phone with her little hand.

‘Stop it, Coco!’ Gaia yelled. ‘You’ll break it!’ Snatching the phone from Coco, she inadvertently answered the call.

‘Hello?’ a voice said through the mouthpiece.

Gaia pressed the phone to her ear, the way she’d seen her daddy hold it. ‘Hello? My name is Gaia. Who is speaking, please?’

‘Gaia?’ the speaker spat. ‘Put Lexi on. I want to talk to my bitch of a daughter.’

It was my mother.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Gaia said, ‘but swears are naughty and Father Christmas will be very cross.’

‘Gaia?’ another voice called, this time from the doorway. Gaia looked across the room to see Maren standing there. She tried to conceal the phone, but it was too late – Maren had seen, and was perturbed. What was Gaia doing with a mobile phone?

‘Give it to me,’ Maren said firmly, holding out her palm. Sheepishly, Gaia handed the phone over.