I trailed behind them, feeling spare. Sasha stopped at a door, knocked, and pushed it open. “Go on in, Molly,” she said. “I’m just going to have a little chat with your mum in another room. Edie can come and get us if you need anything.”
“Wait,” I said. They both looked at me, and I sympathized with Sasha: wanting to say things that Molly wouldn’t hear, when Molly was very present and very keen to hear. “Will I get to see her again?” I asked.
“Get to see who?” asked Molly.
“No one,” I said.
Sasha touched my arm. I wondered how much time, in total, she spent touching people’s arms each day. “Of course you will,” she said. “It’s not. We just. Let’s leave her here with Edie, okay? And we’ll go and talk. Of course you’ll see her again.” I nodded once. I could tell I wouldn’t be able to keep the crying in for much longer, but I didn’t want Molly to see it. “In you go, Molly,” said Sasha. “Those look like chocolate biscuits to me. We’ll see you in a bit.”
She closed the door and carried on down the corridor, up the stairs, and into a large room with a table and chairs in the middle. I sat in one of the chairs and Sasha sat opposite, then changed her mind and moved to the head of the table, so our knees were almost touching. She muttered something about it being cold, got up, and spent some time crouched in front of a portable radiator. It clicked and creaked and began to breathe warm air onto my legs. The room wasn’t that cold. She was stalling.
“So,” she said when she sat down again. “Okay. So. The police know you’re here. Your probation officer. She’s going to come and speak to you. I think she’s bringing a colleague.”
“Okay.”
“Obviously we had to tell them when you took Molly. Because of Molly’s care order. We have to tell them when something like that happens.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us spoke for a while, then Sasha jerked back in her seat and flicked her hands out in front of her.
“Fucking hell, Julia,” she said. “Why?”
I had never heard a social worker swear before. I hadn’t thought they were allowed. The tissue in my hand was damp with snot, and I pulled until it broke apart. “You’re going to take her,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re going to take her away. The meeting. You’re taking her.”
“You mean the meeting we were meant to have yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“You thought that meeting was to tell you we wanted to take Molly away from you?”
“Yeah.”
“But why? Why would we be doing that?”
“Her wrist. Obviously.”
I could tell Sasha wanted to swear again, but she put her fingers over her mouth, then moved them up to her hair and began raking through it. I thought she had probably been doing that all day, and that was probably why so much of it had come down from the ponytail.
“Okay. I see,” she said. She breathed in deliberately. “Yes, I wanted to have a quick word with you about the accident. We have to follow these things up. That’s the whole point of Molly being under a care order. But I mainly just wanted to check you weren’t too upset by it. Because we all understand that it was exactly that. An accident.”
“Oh,” I said.
“To be clear, at no point has there been any talk of taking Molly into care. Not ever. Not the whole time we’ve known you. If a child is under social services, all hospital visits are reported. It’s a standard thing. But if we took every child who broke a bone into care there’d be very few families left intact.”
“Other families aren’t me,” I said.
“You mean other families don’t have your history?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned over the table. With her head bowed, I could see the dark roots of her hair. I didn’t know how old she was. I had always thought of her as a proper grown-up, in a different category to me, but hearing her swear and picturing her bleaching her hair over the bathtub made me think she might not be that old at all. I was a grown-up—I had seen it in Linda’s French windows. Sasha and I might be the same age. Perhaps she got fed up with being in charge too.
“Where did you go?” she asked, rolling her head onto one hand to look at me. “Where have you been?”
“We just went away for a bit. We saw a friend. Molly was safe. She wasn’t in any danger.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well. That’s good.” She sat back in her chair. “Do you want to know what I was going to say at the meeting yesterday? Once I’d checked Molly’s wrist was on the mend? I was going to say how impressed I am with how you’ve been doing recently. When I visit you Molly always seems happy, she always seems to have everything she needs. It’s obvious how much work you put into being her mum, and I think that work is really paying off. I was going to tell you I’ve been thinking about winding back my involvement quite soon. Because I think you can manage on your own.”
The crying came. Not in noisy cat howls; in a quiet, leaking flow. I felt like a book being cracked at the spine. Since Molly had been born I had been telling myself a story about scheming social workers crouched in the shadows, waiting to wrench her out of my useless hands. Sasha made it sound as if there was another story, one with goodies as well as baddies, one where you could turn into
