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.

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

Girl Alone can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts.This is PART 1 of 3 (Chapters 1-9 of 26).You can read Part 1 two weeks ahead of release of the full-length eBook and paperback.Aged nine Joss came home from school to discover her father's suicide. She's never gotten over it.This is the true story of Joss, 13 who is angry and out of control. At the age of nine, Joss finds her father’s dead body. He has committed suicide. Then her mother remarries and Joss bitterly resents her step-father who abuses her mentally and physically.Cathy takes Joss under her wing but will she ever be able to get through to the warm-hearted girl she sees glimpses of underneath the vehement outbreaks of anger that dominate the house, and will Cathy be able to build up Joss’s trust so she can learn the full truth of the terrible situation?

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Copyright (#u7367bcf7-cf8d-5e2c-8515-3b86559ef342)

Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.

HarperElement

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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

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Source ISBN: 9780008138257

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008138271

Version: 2016-03-08

Contents

Cover (#u7bbdb854-5ed9-5d0a-abd1-f215a3ce97af)

Title Page (#ulink_804c46a3-c452-5c4b-872e-c4ca9d4a894f)

Copyright (#ulink_c1629a45-5e49-506c-a02f-18d4f4104d27)

Acknowledgements (#ulink_e725f95a-7a15-5b51-b993-2c87135f405d)

Chapter One: Unsafe Behaviour (#ulink_2acf45c9-b161-5145-87ce-fd3eca71c462)

Chapter Two: I Thought You Loved Me (#ulink_cd10e448-7eb3-5aab-95a6-9f5884d087db)

Chapter Three: Contract of Behaviour (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Four: No Daddy Doll (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five: Eric (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six: Deceived (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven: Letter from the Police (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight: Out of Patience (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine: On Report (#litres_trial_promo)

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#u7367bcf7-cf8d-5e2c-8515-3b86559ef342)

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

Unsafe Behaviour (#u7367bcf7-cf8d-5e2c-8515-3b86559ef342)

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!’