Before I Was Yours

by Virginia Macgregor

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

How far would you go for a child who isn't yours? Why do readers LOVE Virginia Macgregor? 'I defy you not to fall in love' Clare Mackintosh 'Will delight you but break your heart several times over' Sun 'I couldn't put this insightful, compelling novel down' Woman & Home 'Might restore your faith in human nature' Bella Perfect for fans of Dorothy Koomson, Lisa Wingate and Julie Cohen. You Found Me by Virginia Macgregor is OUT NOW ******************************************** Sam and Rosie Keep have always wanted children, but adoption has become their only option; they'll do anything to have a child to love. Seven-year-old Jonah is far away from home, and the man who's meant to be taking care of him has disappeared. When Sam and Rosie meet Jonah they know they've found the child they've dreamed of. But when the unthinkable happens and life changes for all three members of the Keep family, suddenly Sam and Rosie must answer an impossible question: how far are they willing to go for a child who isn't really theirs? MORE PRAISE FOR VIRGINIA MACGREGOR... 'Deeply satisfying' Sarra Manning, Red 'Sharp, funny and hugely moving . . . a must read' Fabulous 'Warm, wise and insightful' Good Housekeeping 'Beautifully written and thought-provoking, this is a brilliant read' Sun 'This wonderful story will tear at your heart.' My Weekly 'Brilliant!' Heat 'A poignant and very clever read' Company 'A truly heart-warming story of family, love and loyalty' Daily Express 'An astonishingly brilliant novel' Australian Women's Weekly 'A touching look at the meaning of motherhood' Good Housekeeping 'A challenging and moving story about the power of love' Image 'Absolutely delightful . . . Everyone should read this book!' Novelicious 'Written with plenty of heart' Sunday Mirror 'An emotional and powerful family drama' Heat 'So engaging and powerful' Press Association 'Layered and lyrical' Irish Independent

Release date: January 26, 2017

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 349

Sample

In the middle of the night, at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, a seven-year-old boy kisses his mama goodbye.

And then he slips his fingers into the hand of the man who’s going to fly him across the sky to his new home.

In London, in a small flat above a laundrette, a flat with low ceilings and thin walls and windows that rattle when the wind blows, a social worker sleeps, her head heavy against her pillow. She’s been working hard: so many children and so many families and so few hours in the day to bring them together.

But today is Christmas. Today, she will sleep all day if she wants.

A little further on from the laundrette, in a grey office block, a Detective Inspector sits at his desk and sips from a mug of cold black coffee. His computer screen casts blue shadows over his face. The office is empty now; no one will be in today.

He puts his arms behind his head and looks at the coloured lights blinking through the window. Soon, they’ll take them down and the year will begin again.

He sits up and clicks his computer back to life.

In Bridgeford, a town cut in half by a railway line, a man sits in his garage working at a piece of driftwood – the nape of a horse’s neck coming to life between his fingers. He doesn’t sleep. And so he sits there through the night, sanding pieces of wood to life until the birds sing the world awake again.

Inside the railway cottage, the man’s wife stands in their bedroom, putting on her midwife uniform. She checks her phone again: The baby’s coming…

Her first Christmas baby, she thinks.

Before she gets up, packs her bag, makes her flask of tea and heads to work, she sits for a moment on the edge of her bed. She strokes the small hill of her stomach and imagines what it must be like to feel a life stirring inside her.

In a hotel in Nairobi, the young mother picks up an envelope full of money, which the man left for her on the bed, and checks out of her room. Then she goes and stands by the pay phone in the lobby. She wants to hear her little boy’s voice, and to know that he made it safely. He isn’t going to land for a few hours yet, but she’ll wait here all the same.

Up in the sky, the little boy grips his arm rests and looks out of the plane window. He looks past the slits of sideways rain that fall against the glass, at the grey sky and at the grey clouds, and wonders what the world will be like when he lands.

He reaches into his backpack for the photograph of his mama: she’s standing on the beach in Lamu, wearing a yellow dress, the sun bouncing off her dark hair and water lapping over her feet.

She leans forward and whispers to him: One day, Jonah, you’ll come home. I promise.

Seven-year-old Jonah looks at the people holding cardboard signs and bunches of flowers: old people and mamas and papas and children. His heart jumps, like the dolphins that shoot up out of the sea back home.

‘I made it, Mama,’ he whispers.

He scans the smiling, wide-eyed faces at the arrival gate and wonders whether maybe they’ve all come out to see him, like back home when everyone runs out onto the beach singing and waving to greet visitors stepping off the boats.

Welcome to England, Jonah, the people’s faces say.

Or maybe they’re Mister Sir’s family, come to greet them after their long journey through the sky. Only, once Jonah and Mister Sir are standing on the other side of the metal gates, in amongst the people with their flowers and cardboard signs, no one’s looking at them any more.

Jonah’s head starts to hurt, like there are elephants stomping around in it. There are too many lights and too many screens. And the stomping in his head clashes with the Christmas music booming out of the walls.

It’s the same music that was playing last night, when he sat in the corridor of the hotel waiting for Mama and Mister Sir to finish having their chat.

A whoosh of cold air sweeps past his legs and goosebumps rise on his arms.

Mama told Jonah there would be snow in England. White, sparkling and beautiful. ‘Much more beautiful than sand,’ she promised.

Jonah looks through the big swishing glass doors at the end of the arrivals room: he can’t see any snow, only the lights of cars, buses and vans rushing past under a night sky. Thin rain spits against the glass doors. Maybe there’ll be snow at Mister Sir’s house, Jonah thinks.

He closes his eyes and remembers what it’s like to feel the sun on his face. In Kenya, even when it’s raining, everyone knows that the sun’s just playing hide and seek – that any moment, it will pop out again and the world will come back to life.

‘People in England like to talk about the weather, Jonah,’ Mama told him. She said it was because the weather in England changed its mind every two seconds. So Mama taught him to say things like:

‘It is positively tropical today.’

‘It is a bit chilly out there.’

‘It is raining cats and dogs.’

‘Hopefully, it will be sunny tomorrow.’

Jonah can’t wait to try the words out on Mister Sir’s family.

Opening his eyes, he puts his hand in front of his mouth and yawns. He couldn’t sleep on the plane: Mister Sir was snoring too loudly. And even when Mister Sir stopped snoring, Jonah couldn’t get rid of the blinking from all the screens – the pictures played behind his eyelids and stopped his brain from resting. At home, when Jonah can’t sleep, he listens to the sea or looks at the pictures in the book Mister Sir brought him from England. Or he sits outside his and Mama’s hut and counts the stars flashing across the dark sky.

Mister Sir stops by a Christmas tree covered in coloured balls, silver string and twinkling lights. Sometimes, they have Christmas trees at Kizingo bar, where Mama likes to have drinks with her Mister Sirs, but Jonah’s never seen one as big or bright as this one. Christmas is Mama’s favourite time of year: she spends more time praying and singing to Jesus at Christmas than at any other time, and that’s saying something, because Mama prays and sings to Jesus all the time. ‘We have to tell him how much we love him,’ Mama says. Judging from all the people who go to Mama’s church, Jonah thinks that Jesus must feel pretty loved already.

Mister Sir puts Jonah’s bag down and clicks closed the handle of his suitcase. Then he gets out his phone. He jabs his fat fingers at the numbers on the screen and then holds the phone to his ear and says, ‘It’s me, love. I’ve just landed.’

Jonah looks up at Mister Sir. He seems taller and further away than he did in Kenya.

‘Is it Mama?’ Jonah asks him.

Mister Sir called Mama ‘my love’, so it must be her. Jonah’s been waiting for ages to talk to Mama on the phone.

‘Shush,’ Mister Sir flutters his fingers in front of Jonah’s face like he’s swatting away a fly.

Mama said she’d call when the plane landed so that Jonah could tell her all the details about England. But maybe she got tired and had a nap and lost track of time. Mama’s been napping lots lately. Only Mama did promise they would talk – and Mama never breaks her promises.

‘I’ve been held up…’ Mister Sir continues. ‘No… nothing to worry about… I’ll see you soon.’

Soon? Jonah’s tummy does a flip. It would take another plane journey across the whole sky before they could see Mama. And Jonah knows that neither he nor Mister Sir is going to see Mama for a long, long time.

So, who is Mister Sir talking to?

Mister Sir ends the call and looks around the room. Jonah does the same. He thinks of the anthills on the beaches back home. Millions of arms and legs and bodies scrabbling around, passing each other crumbs, twigs, leaves, shells: more insect than sand.

Jonah catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror that runs along a tall pillar. The day before they left, Mister Sir took him to a shop in Nairobi. Jonah had hoped that maybe Mister Sir would buy him a suit like all the Mister Sirs from England wear: trousers, a jacket, a waistcoat, a tie, a white shirt, cufflinks, shiny black shoes and maybe even a hat. But the shop did not have any of those things.

When the shopkeeper came back with a pile of clothes, Mister Sir said perfect, though Jonah didn’t think there was anything perfect about the woolly green jumper that itched where it touched Jonah’s skin or the brown corduroy trousers that were too long or the pair of shoes with thick rubber soles that pinched his feet.

The shopkeeper also gave Jonah a red woolly scarf that’s longer than his whole body and a red woolly hat. Jonah couldn’t ever imagine it being cold enough to wear all those clothes.

When he tried them on, he couldn’t breathe. And when he looked at his reflection in the changing room mirror, he thought: I don’t look anything like an English Gentleman.

Jonah told Mama this when they got back to the hotel but she said to stop being so ungrateful and that he should go to Mister Sir and say, thank you very much for the lovely clothes. So he did.

Maybe, now that they are in England, Mister Sir will take him to an English shop and buy him proper English clothes.

After taking him to the clothes shop, Mister Sir bought him a backpack from a market stall. Jonah chose a yellow one because it’s Mama’s favourite colour. Then Mister Sir took Jonah to the barbershop and a man cut off all of Jonah’s curly hair, which had made Mama cry when she saw it. Now his hair is short and tight on his scalp. Here in England, without the sun, his head feels like an ice cube.

He takes out the red woolly hat from his backpack and pulls it down on his head.

I look tiny in this big anthill, Jonah thinks.

‘May I ask a question, Mister Sir?’ Jonah asks.

Mister Sir nods but does not look at Jonah.

Do not be a nuisance, Jonah, Mister Sir is very busy and has very important work to do, Mama had warned him. Mister Sir will look after you, that is all you need to know.

Not being a nuisance means not asking too many questions. But Mama doesn’t understand that sometimes Jonah’s brain hurts it’s so full of questions, buzzing and crashing into each other.

Maybe if he asks the question politely, with one of his special phrases, Mister Sir will not mind.

‘Please excuse my ignorance, but what are we waiting for, Mister Sir?’

Mister Sir stares at Jonah. He has bluey-black smudges under his eyes and there are lots of red veins on his eyeballs. He looks like a different Mister Sir from the one who danced on the beach with Mama.

‘You’ll see,’ Mister Sir snaps.

Mister Sir has been snappy ever since they left Mama at the airport in Nairobi.

Before, when Mama and Mister Sir were together on the beach and then in the hotel in Nairobi, and all the other times Mister Sir has visited Mama, Mister Sir would make jokes and let Jonah wear his Arsenal football shirt. He and Mama would swing Jonah round on the edge of the water until he was dizzy and then they’d throw him into the waves and Jonah would drag them in with him and the three of them would end up wet and sandy and laughing.

Sometimes, Jonah even pretended Mister Sir was his papa.

Mama knew many Mister Sirs but she called this one, ‘My special Mister Sir’.

Jonah’s legs are tired; he wishes he could sit down, but Mama has taught him to wait for the grown-ups to sit first. Just as Jonah is about to point out to Mister Sir that there are two spare seats next to the shop with all the books and newspapers, Mister Sir’s face lights up.

‘Here we go.’ Mister Sir says, his voice bouncy.

He picks up Jonah’s bag, clicks up the handle of his suitcase and walks off really fast.

Jonah struggles to keep up and is grateful when, at last, Mister Sir stops in front of a woman who is holding a baby in a sling. They both have black faces, which makes Jonah think that maybe they come from Kenya too.

Mister Sir holds out his hand to the woman.

‘Aunt Igwe – pleased to meet you.’

Jonah heard Mama and Mister Sir talking about Aunt Igwe last night at the hotel. But he doesn’t know whose aunt she is.

Aunt Igwe looks at Mister Sir and blinks.

‘I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ she says.

‘Oh… I’m sorry,’ Mister Sir mumbles. And then he scans the room again and shakes his head.

The woman, who is not Aunt Igwe, looks at Jonah with the same eyes Mama uses when he’s gone off on one of his walks without telling anyone beforehand. Jonah wants to tell the woman that it’s OK, that he’s with Mister Sir and that he’s come to England to learn to read and to be A True English Gentleman.

‘Come on,’ Mister Sir says to Jonah and starts walking away from the woman who is not Aunt Igwe. ‘Shit,’ says Mister Sir as he walks. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

Jonah has never heard Mister Sir use that word before. Mama would not like it. She says that the words you use on the outside show people who you are on the inside.

At last, Mister Sir drops the bags and slumps into a chair. Jonah’s happy to finally sit down. He slips his feet out of his shoes, which have been squeezing his feet ever since Mama told him to put them on before they left for the airport, then pulls off his socks. On Lamu, he always went around in bare feet. He wriggles his toes and, for a moment, everything feels better.

But once they’re sitting, they keep sitting. They sit for hours and hours and hours.

More people come out of the gate that Jonah and Mister Sir walked through. Hundreds and hundreds of people. Jonah cranes his neck and looks over to the doors, which lead to the outside world, hoping he might spot the sea, but there’s nothing but rain and cars and more rain. Along with snow, Mama promised Jonah that, no matter where he was in England, he would be able to see the sea, because England was an island, like Lamu, and islands have sea all the way around.

Jonah looks at Mister Sir and considers asking him whether he can go outside to check. Maybe if he stands on a bench or climbs a tree he’ll be able to see it. Only Mama’s words fill his head again: England is not like Kenya, Jonah. No wandering off and getting lost.

As the hours go by, more people arrive with cardboard signs, flowers and smiles and then leave together through the glass doors. The jingly Christmas music plays on a loop. An old man in a red suit with a big belly and a beard, a beard that is longer and woollier and whiter than Mister Sir’s, walks past them saying, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’

Jonah tries to sleep, but every time he closes his eyes and slumps in his chair, his stomach growls. He didn’t eat any of the food on the plane because his stomach felt all choppy. Then he starts singing a lullaby that Mama used to sing to him when he was a baby: Kabanyola- Barua ya Mlomo… Mama’s lullabies are the only thing guaranteed to get Jonah to sleep but now she is too far away to sing to him.

Mister Sir sucks his teeth and jiggles his leg up and down. He scans the room and then checks his fat gold watch. Back in Kenya Mister Sir sometimes let Jonah wear his watch. When Jonah has a job and is a Gentleman, a gold watch is the first thing he’s going to buy. And he’ll buy one for Mama too.

When he stops looking at his watch, Mister Sir takes his phone out of his jacket pocket and jabs at it again. Maybe he’s writing a message to Mama to say that they’ve arrived safely. Only Mama doesn’t have a mobile phone, she was going to wait by the pay phone at the hotel.

Jonah wishes he could talk to Mama.

‘Pardon me, Mister Sir, but when are we going home?’

Mister Sir does not answer.

‘Mister Sir?’ Jonah asks again.

But Mister Sir isn’t listening.

Jonah tugs on his sleeve. ‘Will we be going to your house soon?’

Mama told Jonah about the houses in England. An Englishman’s house is his castle, she said. And unlike the huts on Lamu, even the biggest winds and the biggest waves could never sweep the castles away. In England, people’s homes stay forever, Jonah.

Jonah looks forward to living in a forever house.

‘I would very much like to see your house…’ Jonah goes on.

Mister Sir drops his phone.

Always be helpful, Jonah… 

So Jonah bends over and picks it up. Before he hands it back, he stops to look at the screen: a woman and a little girl. Freckles. Orange hair, like the sunsets back home.

Mister Sir snatches the phone away. He doesn’t answer Jonah’s question about seeing his house.

Then Mister Sir sits up, his back and neck as straight as an arrow. He looks across the room and his eyes go wide like he’s spotted a fire.

Jonah follows his gaze. A man in navy uniform, with a navy hat and shiny black shoes, is walking towards them.

Mister Sir bites the nails on his right hand, then he jumps up quickly.

‘You hungry, Jonah?’

Jonah thought Mister Sir would never ask.

‘Yes, please.’

‘I’ll get you a sandwich and some juice.’

All of a sudden Mister Sir is being nice again, like he was when Mama was with them.

Jonah looks around at all the people and worries that maybe Mister Sir will get lost on the way back to him or that he won’t be able to find Jonah because Jonah’s small.

‘Would you allow me to come with you?’ Jonah asks, standing up.

Mister Sir puts his hands on Jonah’s shoulders and pushes him back into his seat.

‘No, you’d better wait here and keep an eye out.’

‘An eye out for what?’

Mister Sir looks back over at the man in the uniform. He’s speaking into his phone.

‘I won’t be long.’

Mister Sir clicks up the handle of his suitcase and walks towards the row of shops at the far end of the room.

Jonah’s used to being on his own. And he’s used to waiting. But back home, waiting meant sitting on a chair outside Mama’s hut or diving for shells while Mama had important talks with her Mister Sirs. It doesn’t feel the same here.

Be brave… A gentleman is always brave… 

But when Jonah looks at the man in the uniform, he wants to bite his nails too. Whenever men in uniform came snooping around their hut, Mama packed up their things and said it was time to move on to a new place. Mama said that men in uniform were trouble.

‘Mister Sir!’

Jonah’s words get swallowed up by the music and the squeak of trolleys and people’s voices on their phones and the ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’ at the arrivals gate.

‘Mister Sir!’

Jonah has lost track of where Mister Sir is; he stands on tiptoes, his feet still bare, and cranes his neck.

And just then, he notices Mister Sir’s head bobbing up and down. Mister Sir is not going into a shop, he’s going past the shops – past all of the shops.

The man in uniform is so close now that Jonah can see the guns slotted into his belt. Men with guns sometimes came onto the beach and that always meant trouble too.

Even though it’s cold, sweat runs down Jonah’s back.

For a second, there’s a clearing between all the people in front of Jonah, and that’s when he sees Mister Sir dragging his wheelie suitcase through the big sliding doors and out into the whooshing world.

 

Jonah’s head spins. The screens and lights blink at him, so bright they make his eyes blur. He can’t hear himself think from the music and shouting and the grinding of coffee machines and the ho-ho-ho of the Father Christmas.

He stands up. His legs feel like they’re going to buckle but he forces them to move.

The man in the uniform walks towards him. He’s so big that Jonah can’t think of a way to get round him.

But big means slow.

Jonah darts forward and veers to the left.

‘Watch out, young man.’ The man with the white beard and the red suit holds out his palms.

‘Sorry,’ Jonah says.

Jonah notices that the man in the blue uniform has turned on his heels.

Jonah takes off again, zigzagging between the crowds of people in the terminal.

When he gets to the doors, Jonah steps out.

The cold concrete shoots up through his bare feet.

‘Mister Sir!’ Jonah cries out at the grey sky.

Raindrops fall on his cheeks.

People with their trolleys rush past him.

A bus crashes through a puddle.

People call after taxis.

‘Mister Sir!’ Jonah scans up and down the road.

He must be here somewhere.

Maybe he went out for a cigarette.

Maybe he went out to find them a car to get home.

Maybe he went back into the terminal while Jonah wasn’t looking and can’t find him.

‘Mister Sir!’ Jonah calls again.

And then, out of the corner of his eye, Jonah sees the blue uniform again.

He bends his legs, ready to dart forward again, but before he has the chance to move, a heavy hand lands on his shoulder.

‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.’ Rosie slips her hand into Sam’s. ‘I think we should go home.’

Sam gives her hand a squeeze. ‘We’ve just got here, my love. And remember what Cathy said, this is our golden ticket.’

Cathy is their social worker. She’s become such a part of their lives that sometimes it feels like there are three people in their marriage.

‘Don’t say that, Sam.’

Rosie hates this way of talking about the adoption process, like it’s filling out a scratchcard. But Sam’s right. Over sixty couples applied to come today, sixty whittled down to thirty that were deemed good matches for the children. And after that, it was a lottery – literally: Cathy explained how their names had been pulled out of a hat.

‘I’m just saying we’re lucky to be here,’ Sam says.

Rosie scans the room. She spots a girl with the name Lucy printed on a sticker stuck to her back. Cathy had explained that they put stickers on the children’s backs because they were more likely to stay on. Children like to pick at things, she said.

There’s no number next to Lucy’s name – the children who have numbers on their stickers are part of sibling groups. Rosie’s heart sinks. She likes the idea of adopting more than one child. If she’d been able to have babies naturally, she’d have a people-carrier full of them by now. Before the miscarriages and the failed IVF, she’d imagined herself as Maria from The Sound of Music: dancing through the streets followed by a tribe of singing, dancing children. Even though Sam and Rosie’s tiny railway cottage can barely hold the two of them, and even though they can’t afford to have a big family, given half a chance, Rosie would take home every child here today.

Sam adjusts Rosie’s lion headband and smiles. ‘Your ears are crooked.’

Rosie keeps her eyes focused on Lucy.

‘Maybe we should have come as monkeys,’ she says. ‘Monkeys are fun.’ She spots the two gay guys they met as they walked in: they’re dressed as monkeys. ‘Children like monkeys…’

It turned out that adoption parties always have a theme. Toy Story. Disney. Under The Sea. Or Jungle, like this one.

For the last month, Rosie and Sam have watched every animal-themed film they could get their hands on. Rosie took notes in her special adoption notebook. Because they have to be ready for all eventualities. Which includes talking to children about fictional animals whilst trying to remember whether Baloo was the bear and Bagheera the panther, or the other way round, and the difference between Marlin, Dory and Nemo or whether Scrat is the sloth and Sid the squirrel, or Sid the sloth and Scrat the squirrel.

And then Rosie got worried that the films they’d watched were out of date.

And then she’d fretted about which costume to go for. What would the children like best? Or rather, which ones would give the best impression to the children’s social workers and foster parents who, Cathy warned them, have a lot of power?

If there’s anything Rosie’s learnt about the adoption process, it’s that everything is a test.

You can’t go wrong with lions, Rosie, Sam’s mum, Flick, had said when they asked. Think of The Lion King. It’s about a cub working out his place in the world – isn’t that what adoption is about?

Flick always says the right thing. And she understands kids. And so, although Rosie had worried that The Lion King was even more passé than the other films they’d watched, she decided to go with it: a mane for Sam; soft ears for Rosie; and lion onesies, rented from the fancy dress shop in Bridgeford.

‘You look beautiful,’ Sam says. ‘Elegant and warm and strong.’ He kisses her cheek. ‘The perfect mother.’

Sometimes, it makes Rosie nervous, how much hope Sam invests in her. What if there’s a reason she can’t have children? What if it’s not just about biology, about her ovaries failing to release eggs as they should? What if someone, somewhere, has weighed her up and decided that she isn’t cut out to be a mother? What if they know that she’ll muck it up?

Maybe the world is divided up between people who should and shouldn’t be allowed to have children and Rosie just hasn’t woken up to the fact that she’s on the shouldn’t pile.

She blinks away the thought and takes a breath. ‘Let’s go and play with one of the children.’

‘That’s more like it,’ Sam says.

Rosie spots a little girl sitting on the carpet, playing with jungle puppets. Her blonde hair is gathered into wispy pigtails.

Rosie’s chest tightens. Cathy has told them over and over to avoid imagining an ideal child. And Rosie has tried to follow her advice, to shake off thoughts about age or gender or ethnicity. But she can’t help it. And she can’t help remembering how, when they started trying for a baby, Sam would stroke her stomach and say, A girl… a little Rosie, that would be just perfect…

Perfect. Again.

The little girl’s T-shirt is covered in pink and white sequins and she has wings on her back: she’s a beautiful, shimmering butterfly.

They should have come as a more delicate animal, Rosie thinks, a hummingbird perhaps – do hummingbirds live in jungles? Something a little girl would like, anyway.

Rosie guesses Lucy must be about five. At the briefing, the organiser of the adoption activity day said that they kept the ages off the children’s profiles to help the adopters remain open-minded. ‘You might think you want a child under the age of five,’ the organiser said, ‘but once you meet a real, in the flesh nine-year-old, trust me, you’ll be won over.’

Rosie doesn’t need a label to tell her how old a child is. Over the last ten years, children have become her specialism: her friend’s children, the children who pour out of Bridgeford Primary, the children she sees in the supermarket, at the hairdressers, in coffee shops, on the bus, on the train, at the park near their house. And she’s read hundreds of books on child development – she’s determined to be prepared for the day when they have a child of their own to care for. So she can tell a child’s age within a few seconds of meeting them. Lucy is definitely about five. Which means she’s still young enough to become theirs.

There’s another adopter looking at Lucy, a single woman. Rosie noticed her at the briefing: leopard-print tights, a leopard-print shirt, gold eye shadow and gold glittery heels.

Rosie glances around the room and then whispers to Sam, ‘Is it me or is everyone looking at Lucy?’

‘Lucy?’

Rosie nudges her head towards the little girl dressed as a butterfly.

‘Oh…’ Sam shrugs. ‘Maybe… I don’t know. ’

But Rosie knows. If being here is their golden ticket, Lucy is the golden child. And every adopter here has worked that out.

Don’t be deceived by appearances. All the children will have significant issues, Cathy had told Rosie and Sam in their meeting last week. That’s why they’re coming to the adoption party. This is their last chance.

And it feels like Rosie and Sam’s last chance too. They’ve been trying to adopt for two years and they still haven’t found a match.

But Lucy doesn’t look like a child who’s on her last chance. She looks like a happy little girl with rosy skin, a delicate mouth and eyes that sparkle as she makes her giraffe puppet fly through the air. The kind of child that anyone in their right mind would love to call theirs.

Sam puts his hand on the small of Rosie’s back and guides her to where Lucy is sitting. They crouch down beside her.

‘I didn’t know giraffes could fly,’ Sam says to Lucy.

Lucy looks up at them and smiles. Rosie’s heart swells. Sam’s right: it’s good that they’re here. This is what they’ve been waiting for. Their golden ticket.

 

‘They always go for the girls,’ says the boy next to Jonah.

They’re sitting at the craft table making animals out of Play-Doh. The boy’s in a wheelchair.

Jonah follows the boy’s gaze over to the little girl dressed as a butterfly; she’s sitting on the lap of a woman in a lion costume. A man in a lion costume makes a zebra puppet dance in front of her. The little girl laughs. There are lots of other grown-ups with green badges standing around the little girl too. Jonah’s social worker, Trudi, explained that green badges meant the grown-up was an adopter.

Your Forever Family might be here today, Trudi said to him earlier as she squeezed his hand.

Trudi still hasn’t understood that Jonah doesn’t want a Forever Family – or any family at all for that matter.

‘They always focus on cute kids first,’ the boy in the wheelchair says.

Jonah thinks the boy must be quite a lot older than he is: he seems to know about everything and he keeps using words Jonah hasn’t heard before.

‘They’ll get bored of her soon.’ The boy picks up a red feather that’s dropped onto his lap and smacks it back onto his chest. He’s covered with feathers – reds and yellows and greens, all Sellotaped onto his black T-shirt. ‘Stupid costume,’ he mumbles.

‘At least there are parrots in the jungle,’ Jonah says, helping the boy stick one of the feathers back onto his T-shirt.

The boy looks Jonah up and down and laughs. ‘Yeah, you’d have to be a pretty magical starfish to survive in the Amazon.’

Jonah nods. ‘Julie, my foster carer, thought the theme was Under The Sea – like the last one she went to.’

Jonah doesn’t really mind. . .