Taken. Rosie Lewis

and losing count as I scooped the powdered formula milk into carefully measured amounts of boiled water, so that I had to tip the rogue mixture away, sterilise all six bottles and start all over again.

      Apart from all the crying, her cleft meant that feeding seemed to take for ever. With barely two hours in between bottles, day trips were not as easy as they might have been, especially as she was frequently sick afterwards. Our health visitor reassured me that, while it may have seemed as if Megan brought up the entire feed, enough probably stayed inside to nourish her.

      I had always loved the school holidays but I was glad that Emily and Jamie were both tied up with their own projects during the first couple of weeks of the summer break – Emily had taken a voluntary job at our local hospital, lining up songs for the DJ running the children’s radio channel, and Jamie had started working towards his Duke of Edinburgh Award. If he wasn’t on the football pitch practising new skills, he was at his friend’s house, learning riffs on an electric guitar. When they were home they didn’t seem to mind Megan fretting as I worried they might, always offering to take a turn in walking her around.

      There were some rare peaceful moments as well. Sometimes during the late evening the cramps relaxed their grip on Megan and she would stare around at us in wonder, as if seeing us for the first time. Emily and Jamie delighted in those times, whispering softly as they dipped their faces to her neck, nuzzling her gently with their chins. Whenever she was out of her room, which wasn’t much during Megan’s early weeks, Zadie would watch her with quiet intensity, an anguished look on her face. I wondered again whether she felt pushed out, but when I tried to include her or even spoke about Megan, she would lose colour in her face and fly back to her room. I considered the possibility that Zadie was disturbed by Megan’s cleft, but she loved to watch those graphic fly-on-the-wall medical documentaries that made my stomach flip over, so I knew she wasn’t squeamish like me.

      Anyway, Zadie had seemed unsettled by the mere idea of a baby in the house, even before the placement had begun.

      When Megan had been with us for about five days my mum kindly offered to babysit so that I could take the older children out on their own. We decided to go to the cinema and then on for a meal, and it was lovely to spend some uninterrupted time with them all, but strangely surreal as well. Every so often a mild panic gripped me; that sudden sense that something was amiss. When the film was over I called Mum, who assured me in an insistent (if slightly strained) voice that all was fine, but I could hear Megan’s cries in the background and, though I’d been longing for a break from the regime of pacing and feeding, I felt a strong urge to get back to her.

      It was late when we finally got home and I was pleased to see that Megan had stopped crying. Stretched out on the sofa in one of her cramp-free moments, she was staring up at Mum’s face with avid fascination, her shallow breaths racing with intrigue as Mum clucked and cooed. Suddenly she made a funny whistling noise and we all laughed, Emily and Jamie crouching on the floor to join in the fun. It probably didn’t help much towards establishing a day-time/night-time routine, but I went along with the fun and games anyway, aware that this baby’s charms were already drawing all of us in.

       Chapter Six

      A week after Megan’s arrival, something happened that arrested our long summer days and, for a while at least, turned them upside down. After an early-morning self-harming incident and a high-speed trip to Accident and Emergency in an ambulance, I was astounded to discover that Zadie was several months pregnant.

      Deep down I had known that something was wrong – the feeling had dogged me for weeks – but the news still came as a huge shock, particularly as Zadie was the last teenager I would ever have suspected of engaging in risky behaviour. Devout and introverted, she had struggled to maintain eye contact when she first arrived, and, until recently, had barely spoken above a whisper.

      The shock was marginally cushioned by the confirmation that Zadie had been several months pregnant when she arrived (the part of me concerned with holding on to a job I loved relieved that it hadn’t happened while she was in my care), but she was so young and vulnerable that it was difficult to imagine her sneaking off to meet someone against her father’s wishes. The hideous alternative possibility, that she hadn’t had any choice, lurked, unacknowledged, somewhere in the back of my mind.

      Driving away from hospital the next morning, guilt washed over me. Zadie had spent ten weeks in my care but hadn’t felt able to confide in me – a failing that no foster carer would be keen to admit to. Not only that, but I had overlooked signs that now seemed so obvious, such as her unexplained nausea, frantic exercising, no evidence of monthly periods – I felt such a fool.

      My mother had held the fort at home and it was a relief to share some of my fears for Zadie over a cup of tea when I got back. It was only after she’d left that the wider implications of Zadie’s pregnancy began to sink in.

      Soft mutterings from Megan’s carrycot interrupted my thoughts and drew me to the dining room, and as I lifted her up the first thing I realised was that she had slept for a whole hour without crying out in pain. Thrilled at this first sign of progress, I kissed her forehead, her soft skin warm against my lips. Her small splayed fingers moved purposely through the air as I carried her along the hall, her lips moving with such deliberation as she stared up at me that it really felt like she was miming. ‘Yes, I know what you’re trying to tell me, my love, I know,’ I said, smiling down at her. ‘Your first comfortable sleep. I’m very happy about that too.’

      The living room looked like the storeroom in the basement of a shockingly disorganised branch of a baby-merchandising retailer. Apart from all the usual baby equipment, there were baby gifts dotted all around the room; a pink and white blanket crocheted by my mother, a pile of assorted furry and velour soft toys and fluffy blankets from our neighbours all along the street, and a small pink kitten from Peggy.

      I was just contemplating the arrival of a second baby in the house and all the associated regalia that might entail, when another thought struck me – what if Peggy decided, when she heard the news, that two babies and a teenager was too much for one foster carer to cope with? Might she worry that my attention would be too thinly stretched? If that was the case, there was a chance that, on the basis of ‘last-in, first-out’, Megan might be moved on to another foster carer.

      A fair number of the foster carers at Bright Heights Fostering Agency operated a strict ‘no babies’ policy, but there were plenty of others who loved caring for newborns.

      I lowered Megan onto her padded mat and gently removed her wet nappy. Her legs were still so thin and scrawny that I couldn’t wait to tuck them back into her sleep suit, for fear they might break. As I dabbed her bottom with damp cotton wool, my eyes fixed on the stump of an umbilical cord clinging stubbornly to her tummy. It was sad to think of any baby being parted from their mother so soon after birth. I felt a pang in my chest at the prospect of Megan going through yet another separation so early on in her life.

       Chapter Seven

      When Zadie came home the next day she broke down and told me the whole horrific story – she had fled the family home to escape her abusive elder brother, and by then she was already three months pregnant. After talking to me she fell into an exhausted sleep and, with Megan asleep in her carrycot, I took the opportunity to email a report to Peggy while the disclosure was still fresh in my mind.

      Foster carers are encouraged to keep detailed and accurate notes because, in some cases, their records are summoned by the courts to form part of the case for the prosecution in any criminal trial. I force myself to listen passively if a child makes a disclosure, however strong the temptation to elicit more information from them. Most children possess a strong desire to please and so, if they’re asked a question more than once, there’s always a risk that they might alter their answer in the mistaken belief that they haven’t said what the adult wants to hear. In that way, well-meaning carers asking