Girl Alone: Part 1 of 3: Joss came home from school to discover her father’s suicide. Angry and hurting, she’s out of control.. Cathy Glass
"u4b9bafc2-7c64-5e59-bcec-8ea108eafb3c">
Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
HarperElement
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Cathy Glass 2015
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Deborah Pendell/Arcangel Images (posed by model)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cathy Glass asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at
Source ISBN: 9780008138257
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008138271
Version: 2016-03-08
Contents
Chapter Two: I Thought You Loved Me
Chapter Three: Contract of Behaviour
Chapter Seven: Letter from the Police
Chapter Eight: Out of Patience
A big thank-you to my family; my editors, Holly and Carolyn; my literary agent, Andrew; my UK publishers HarperCollins, and my overseas publishers, who are now too numerous to list by name. Last but not least, a big thank-you to my readers for your unfailing support and kind words.
Chapter One
I hate you!’ Joss screamed at the top of her voice. ‘I hate you. I hate your house and your effing family! I even hate your effing cat!’
Our beloved cat, Toscha, jumped out of Joss’s way as she stormed from the living room, stomped upstairs and into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
I took a deep breath and sat on the sofa as I waited for my pulse to settle. Joss, thirteen, had arrived as an emergency foster placement twelve days earlier; angry, volatile and upset, she wasn’t getting any easier to deal with. I knew why she was so angry. So too did her family, teacher, social worker, previous foster carers and everyone else who had tried to help her and failed. Joss’s father had committed suicide four years previously, when Joss had been nine years old, and she and her mother had found his lifeless body. He’d hanged himself.
This was trauma enough for any child to cope with, but then, when Joss was twelve, her mother had tried to move on with her life and had remarried. Joss felt rejected and that her mother had betrayed her father, whom she’d been very close to. Her refusal to accept her new stepfather as her younger brother had been able to had seen family arguments escalate and Joss’s behaviour sink to the point where she had to leave home and go to live with an aunt. The aunt had managed to cope with Joss’s unsafe and unpredictable behaviour for a month, but then Joss had gone into foster care. Two carers later, with Joss’s behaviour deteriorating further, she’d come to live with me – the day after Danny, whose story I told in Saving Danny, had left.
It was felt that, as a very experienced foster carer, I’d be able to manage and hopefully improve Joss’s behaviour, but there’d been little progress so far. And, while I felt sorry for her and appreciated why she was so upset and angry, allowing her to self-destruct wasn’t going to help. Her present outburst was the result of my telling her that if she was going out she’d have to be in by nine o’clock, which I felt was late enough for a girl of thirteen to be travelling home on the bus alone. I’d offered to collect her in my car from the friend’s house she was supposedly going to, so she could have stayed a bit later, but she’d refused. ‘I’m not a kid,’ she’d raged. ‘So stop treating me like one!’
It was Friday evening, and what should have been the start of a relaxing weekend had resulted in me being stressed (again), and my children Adrian (sixteen), Lucy (thirteen) and Paula (twelve) being forced to listen to another angry scene.
I gave Joss the usual ten minutes alone to calm down before I went upstairs. I wasn’t surprised to find Paula and Lucy standing on the landing looking very worried. Joss’s anger impacted on the whole family.
‘Shall I go in and talk to her?’ Lucy asked. The same age as Joss and having come to me as a foster child (I was adopting her), Lucy could empathize closely with Joss, but