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You’ll probably believe you’re in love many, many times over the next few years, but you know what?’

      Keeley shrugged. ‘What?’

      But that at least meant she was listening. ‘The most important person you should be learning to love right now is yourself. What you said to me last night, Keeley’ – I touched my chest – ‘about that hole you feel inside yourself? That’s the place you need to start. That’s the kind of negative thinking you have to work hard to start challenging. Easier said than done, I know, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. Thoughts are just thoughts. They only exist in our heads. So you have to start thinking differently about yourself. You have as much right to exist on the earth as the next person, and, particularly given the terrible times you’ve been through, I’d say more right to happiness than many. If you make your first goal to accept that, then everything else will follow – then you can start building on the rest. Like looking in the mirror and seeing someone who’s capable and smart and thoughtful and kind – someone who has every bit as much potential as the next person. You just have to find out where that potential lies, and you can only do that if you feel you’re a project worth working on. Do you? Because I do or I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you that, would I? But you need to, Keeley. Everything else flows from there. Including making successful relationships.’

      She sat silently for a bit, hopefully digesting what I’d said to her.

      ‘I feel so bad for him,’ she said eventually. ‘I know I said it wasn’t like that and that they didn’t understand, but I’m not stupid. I know Jamie’s got a bunch of stuff going on that means it wouldn’t have worked.’

      Not least his age – which was more than double hers – I thought, but didn’t say. ‘Because you’re an intelligent girl,’ I said instead.

      ‘And he never lied to me. Not once,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was capable of lying,’ she added.

      That spoke volumes to me. To wilfully play with the truth for personal gain – well, that took a certain level of intellect, didn’t it? And she had enough of that to have reflected on that, too.

      ‘He reminded me of my mum,’ she said next, surprising me.

      ‘Your mum?’

      She sniffed again. ‘In a way, you know? As in needing to be helped. You know – problems in his head. My mum was a bit like that. Not good at coping with stuff. Day-to-day stuff, you know? But she managed okay. D’you think he’ll manage okay?’

      I thought about Keeley’s rose-tinted interpretation of the word ‘managing’. Her mum hadn’t managed anything, as far as I could see. Well, she’d managed to have five children and lose them to the care system. But it always needed remembering that heroin was at the top of the villainy food chain there.

      But that wasn’t what we were about here in any case. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he’s managed well enough this far in life, hasn’t he? But he’s not for you. And I don’t think you need me to tell you that, do you?’

      She shook her head. Then she managed a wan, even slightly playful smile. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for sleeping in park shelters,’ she said.

      I got a phone call from Danny just as I was making some bacon sandwiches for our lunch. Tyler had got up and gone off with his mates while Keeley had been showering, and since then she’d spent a little time helping me with chores. Then, because there didn’t seem any single good reason not to, I said I’d join her in watching Everybody Loves Raymond on TV, the fact that she’d even asked me to sit and watch it with her being absolutely key.

      ‘I’m running late,’ he said. ‘Sorry. You know how it goes. Too many cases and too few of us. And between you and me, certain people are being too flipping precious about which cases they will or won’t take. Anyway it means it’s looking like it’ll be nearer two now, I’m afraid. Is that going to mess up your schedule?’

      I smiled at the notion that he thought I even had one. ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry to hear that.’ And then something struck me. Something triggered by what he’d said. The name Keeley had mentioned. A name I hadn’t heard before. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ I finished, suddenly anxious to ring off.

      I smiled across at Keeley as I’d said this, catching her yawn turn to a grimace. Despite her early start, or because of it, more likely, it was clear she was now beginning to flag.

      ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I was going to go for a nap after he’d been. Would it be okay if I go back to bed for a bit now instead then? And you can call me when he gets here? He’s only coming here to shout at me, after all.’

      I didn’t need to confirm that, because she already knew the drill. So I simply said of course she could. She was still evidently very short on sleep – a commodity teens needed more of than people often gave them credit for. It also gave me a chance to write up all my notes while they were fresh in my mind. And, to use Tyler’s parlance, to follow up the interesting lead I’d just been gifted.

      It took no longer than fifteen minutes to confirm what I thought. That the social worker assigned to Keeley before Danny hadn’t been called Mrs Higgins. Which was what I’d already worked out, because I remembered that it had been Keeley herself that had called her previous social worker a bitch, hadn’t she? Not cool. Not nice. Far from it. A bitch.

      So when was a Mrs Higgins assigned to her, then? There was nothing in the notes about a social worker called Mrs Higgins. Just an on-duty social worker for Keeley’s first few days in care. All the subsequent notes – the ones made by her social worker as opposed to those by her foster carers, panel, child and adolescent mental health services, and so on – were in the name Banks, the woman assigned to her before Danny.

      Of course, it might well be that this Mrs Higgins meant nothing. She probably did. That she was just assigned to her temporarily, perhaps only very briefly. But Keeley had spoken about her warmly, which was a positive in an otherwise negative file. Except she wasn’t in there. No sign of her name anywhere that I could see. Despite knowing he was busy, I called Danny back and asked him. And he hadn’t heard of her either.

      ‘But certainly I’ll see what I can find out,’ he promised. ‘Cross the I’s, dot the T’s.’

      ‘Exactly,’ I said. Though my purpose was rather different. I just wanted to follow up any shred of evidence, however ancient, however random, however tenuous, however sentimental – that Keeley hadn’t been entirely alone.

      In the meantime, of necessity, it was business as usual, and I knew that when Danny arrived to see Keeley the riot act would duly be read.

      So while he composed himself in the living room as her hard-talking social worker, I went upstairs, woke Keeley and asked her to come down. I then had to listen while he sat her down and gave her a stern lecture about how badly she’d let him down, just how close to the wind she was sailing as far as this placement went, and how she was not only extremely lucky we’d agreed to continue to keep her, but, with this latest stunt, not even deserving of our largesse.

      It was the first time I’d seen Danny in this different incarnation, and I realised he was going to have a brilliant career. It’s not often someone so young (not to mention young-looking) can command such respect. I could see Keeley wilting, her chin wobbling under his disappointed gaze, and in that, I also saw something positive – that he had earned her respect. Had he not, her demeanour and body language would have been so different – she would have been sullen, unresponsive, defiant.

      Still, when he responded to her abject tears and saucer eyes with a sharp ‘it’s way too late for turning on the waterworks with me, Keeley!’ I wanted to run across and hug her and tell him to leave her alone, even as I understood that it was an act for her benefit; that he was only doing what he had to.

      Because if you took it back to the day she was taken into care, it couldn’t help but strike me that she was the one who’d been let down – so badly – first by being born into a life that no

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