It was the fairest answer anyone had given me.

PART 4

Three weeks earlier, on the day I first saw their photographs, I had been repairing a dining table.

The client’s daughter had carved her initials underneath it twenty years before, and he wanted the scratches left intact.

‘They’re part of the family,’ he’d said.

I was sanding around those marks when the emergency placement notice appeared on my phone.

Five children.