I felt cold and sick as we sat around the large oval table in an institutional grey room to hear the experts decide whether my children were at risk: in my hands, under my care. My children. My children.

Everything rested on this meeting.

Philippa had advised me not to speak. That was okay by me. If anyone had asked me to speak I would have vomited. My mother held my hand under the table. Peter sat on the other side of Philippa and he would not look at me. Dr. Isobel Frayn spoke first. ‘I found a bruise on her left arm, which Rosie informed me was the result of falling off the trim trail in the playground.’

DC Miles checked her notes. ‘The playground monitor, Annie McLean, confirmed that a fall had occurred on November the second.’

I wanted to tell them how long it had taken me to dress Rosie when she was a baby, how gently I had pushed her chubby fists into her sleeves. I wanted to tell them how many kisses I had planted on her face when she fell as a toddler, when she had run ahead before her legs could carry her. I wanted to tell them how I, too, was winded when I saw her fall from a tree onto her back last summer. Why wasn’t I allowed to tell them that?

Miranda Slater spoke next, while she flicked and dangled her smooth grey mane. She had serious concerns about the ‘instability’ caused by my ‘alleged mood swings’ and ‘sudden departure from the home’ coupled with Rosie’s ‘recent head injury and suspected concussion.’

She had rolled away from me. Hadn’t she? Who could I ask to replay what had happened? Peter? What had he seen that I hadn’t?

Philippa Letwin responded in measured tones. ‘Gemma absolutely refutes the allegation that she has in any way harmed Rosie at any point, including that of the incident mentioned, but she feels strongly that the logistics of parenting under the levels of scrutiny and supervision drawn up in the written agreement was stifling and unsettling for the children. Quite selflessly, she believes that Rosie and Noah are now in a stable and secure environment until the hearing, dependent upon Helen and Peter’s continued care.’

But I want to go home now. I have so much to say. Could they see me? Was I invisible?

Miranda nodded, of course, and shared a sideways glance with DC Miles, before adding that ‘consideration should be given as to whether to hold a child-protection conference prior to the child’s birth.’

I clutched my stomach as if she had the power to rip my baby from my womb.

The peripheral view of Peter’s face began to blur, the whole room began to fizz around the edges as my heart leapt haphazardly in my chest.

‘No!’ I cried out, but Philippa held my arm and shot me a warning glance. ‘No, no, no,’ I muttered, under my breath, digging my nails into my thighs.

You’ll never take my baby. Never. Never. Never.

My mother spoke up. I recognised her outrage. Her palm sweated through my trouser leg. Peter spoke. Or mumbled, waffling sheepishly. ‘...wonderful mother... under a lot of stress.’ Numbness spread through me. His regretful ramblings about my ‘uncharacteristic’ behaviour made me cringe. Who was this man who said he loved me?

Philippa said, ‘In terms of her unborn child, with all due respect, I suggest we wait upon the outcome of the ongoing assessment, pending the CPS hearing on December fourth.’

I’ll die if you take my children away from me. Don’t you understand?

Philippa must have seen the horror that had drawn the blood away from my face, for she scribbled on a notepad that she pushed in front of me. Hang in there. It’s almost over.

I was drenched in sweat. I felt it rolling down my back, under my arms, between my swollen breasts. The breasts that had fed my children, that would feed the baby that grew inside me. My role as a mother was being rubbed out, but I held the sensations and memories in my body like painful reminders of the mother I would always be.

How I yearned for Rosie and Noah now. Their absence was an unbearable void.

But the chairperson, whose name escaped me, the police and the doctor and the social workers, all seemed satisfied with their officially agreed-upon decisions to put Rosie and Noah on the Child Protection Plan under the category of Physical Abuse. They now universally believed that Rosie and Noah were at significant risk of being harmed by me. The conference had been neatly tied up for now, enough to stand up and leave. Everyone had their duties and roles nicely delineated. Through their eyes, through the prism of their moral and correct judgement, the threat of me had been removed from the equation. I had chosen to move out of my own home and now somehow I was being forced to stay out. Within one hour of sitting in this drab, mean room, I had seen enough to know the tide had turned. DC Miles and Miranda Slater did not simply suspect I was guilty, they knew. Tick. Job well done. Their trajectory was now clear.

I couldn’t stand up. I had lost all ability to move. Everything was moving around me too rapidly.

But Peter could move. It amazed me that he could. It amazed me that he could walk. Towards me.

‘Don’t come near me,’ I said.

As my mother tried to coax me out of the room, I thought back to the ranting and raving of that young woman in the police station and I envied her, spitefully.

I needed that fight in me, but at the same time I didn’t trust it. Spitting abuse had landed that woman in a cell. My temper, my lack of patience, my lack of self-control had brought me here, to this awful room. Finally, I knew how not to be, but I didn’t know how to be. I didn’t know how to fight for my children, without fighting.

A silent scream reverberated around my body, perhaps trapped forever inside me.

---

A shaft of sunlight lasered through the crack in the curtains, stubbornly, cruelly rejecting my pleas for darkness. I fumbled for my laptop by my bedside. In one line to Lisa in an email, I could not convey how ill I was: how pointless my breathing had become, how useless my body was to me or my baby, how my thoughts tortured me. My phone lay switched off. I had crawled away from the outside world, tired of the spotlight, worthless in the life I used to own.

At night, I writhed, wide awake, moving from bed to sofa and back to bed again. My eyes ached with exhaustion and misery. I paced from room to room, as though walking towards something, and ending up nowhere, letting one fruitless step follow the next, finding no pathway, no answers. The anxiety crippled me: Were the children safe? What were they doing? Where were they? How were they feeling? Did they miss me? And then the anger came, towards Peter, towards my mother, towards Mira, towards the police, towards Miranda. For holding my children away from me, as though lifting them up from the snapping jaws of a crocodile. I was bitter with loathing and I beat my fists into my mattress, over and over, until I collapsed and curled up in a pitiful ball of self-hatred and powerlessness.

My whole being moaned and twisted at the threat that loomed, the threat that I could never really reach in my thoughts consciously, knowing the very concept of losing my three babies was intolerable. A blinding shot of white blanked out that future. I could not conceive of it, I could not endure it.

Each day was a delirium: an overpowering, endless torment that I had to survive somehow, as the authorities planned my family’s future, without me in it, as the clock ticked towards the fourth of December, when I would hear whether the Crown Prosecution Service had overwhelming evidence to prosecute me for child abuse.