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Contents
Contents
Chapter Three: The Photographs
Chapter Nine: Sexualizing the Innocent
Chapter Ten: Calm Before the Storm
Chapter Thirteen: Two-Parent Family
Chapter Fifteen: Loyal to Abuser
Chapter Sixteen: Are You Happy Here?
Chapter Seventeen: Special Present
Chapter Eighteen: Sudden Turn of Events
Chapter Twenty-One: The Telephone Call
Chapter Twenty-Two: Icing on the Cake
Chapter Twenty-Three: She Must Hate Me
Chapter Twenty-Four: A New Friend
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Decision
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Postcard
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Couple in the Playground
A big thank-you to my editor Holly; my literary agent Andrew; Carole, Vicky, Laura, Hannah, Virginia and all the team at HarperCollins.
To write this book – Beth’s story – I need to go back in time, to when Adrian was six and Paula was just two. I had only been fostering for a few years, and back then foster carers were given little in the way of training or support, or background information on the child. They were ‘thrown in at the deep end’ and left to get on with it, either swimming or sinking under the strain of it all. Looking back now, I shudder to think of some of the unsafe situations my family and I were placed in, and I also wonder – with the benefit of hindsight from years of fostering and training – if I would have handled situations differently. Some, maybe, but not with Beth. I am sure I would have made the same decisions then as now, for some behaviour is never acceptable