When You Were Mine: An utterly heartbreaking page-turner Read online

  When You Were Mine

  An utterly heartbreaking page-turner

  Kate Hewitt

  Books by Kate Hewitt

  Standalone Novels

  When You Were Mine

  Into the Darkest Day

  A Hope for Emily

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  Not My Daughter

  The Secrets We Keep

  A Mother’s Goodbye

  This Fragile Life

  When He Fell

  Rainy Day Sisters

  Now and Then Friends

  A Mother like Mine

  The Far Horizons Trilogy

  The Heart Goes On

  Her Rebel Heart

  This Fragile Heart

  Writing as Katharine Swartz

  The Vicar's Wife

  The Lost Garden

  The Second Bride

  The Other Side of The Bridge

  AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

  Into the Darkest Day (Available in the UK and the US)

  A Hope for Emily (Available in the UK and the US)

  No Time to Say Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)

  Not My Daughter (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Secrets We Keep (Available in the UK and the US)

  A Mother’s Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Heart Goes On (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Rebel Heart (Available in the UK and the US)

  This Fragile Heart (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Not My Daughter

  Hear More from Kate

  Books by Kate Hewitt

  A Letter from Kate

  The Heart Goes On

  Her Rebel Heart

  This Fragile Heart

  Into the Darkest Day

  A Hope for Emily

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  The Secrets We Keep

  A Mother’s Goodbye

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated to my sister Susie, who is a wonderful example and inspiration of motherhood, and also kindly answered many of my questions about foster care. Thank you! Love you, Suse!

  Prologue

  “All rise.”

  As the judge comes into the courtroom—a rather grand name for a space the size of a classroom, fitted out with Formica tables and plastic chairs—my palms dampen. My heart races. For a second, I see stars and I think I might pass out. Finally this day is here, and I have no idea how to feel about it.

  The judge, a woman with hair the color of steel and an expression to match, surveys the room, her gaze resting briefly and impassively on me, before she refers to her notes.

  “This is the first hearing to review current custody arrangements for Dylan McBride.” The words fall into the stillness, and then she clears her throat as she looks down at the case file with all its notes and documentations, accusations and commendations, blame and praise.

  I take a deep breath and glance at Lisa, the court-appointed lawyer standing next to me, a woman I’ve only met twice. So much hangs on her, on this moment, and of course on me. Me. I can’t pretend this isn’t all about me, and whether I am good enough. Strong enough. Mother enough.

  I feel someone else’s eyes on me, a steady gaze I never expected, and I turn. And then we begin.

  1

  BETH

  I’m about to lose my son over a pack of Twizzlers. Of course, that’s not the whole story. It can’t be. But in the moment when Susan, a kindly-looking woman I’ve learned not to trust, took Dylan away as he kicked and screamed for me, that’s how it felt. A lousy pack of Twizzlers.

  But this is how it really happened—I was in the system, and once you’re in the system, with calls logged and visits made, with notes in the margins about how messy your house is or how tired you look, you’re screwed. That’s the unfortunate truth.

  So when Dylan lost it in the middle of a CVS because I wouldn’t buy him a second pack of Twizzlers, and a woman in the next aisle poked her head around all suspiciously, eyes narrowed as she watched Dylan throw himself onto the floor and start banging his head against it—I realized this was going to be bad.

  I’ve tried not to take Dylan out very much, for exactly this reason. We make do with the places he knows and loves—the park, the library, Whole Foods when it’s not busy. When he does melt down, and that happens fairly often, I try to get him out of the situation as quickly and safely as possible. I try, and sometimes I fail, and the guilt I feel is the worst part of it all. No one feels as bad about losing my temper as I do.

  So that’s what happened in CVS. I told Dylan he couldn’t have the Twizzlers because I’d come out with a five-dollar bill and I’d already spent it. We’d been having a tough morning already, because Dylan woke up at three and didn’t go back to sleep till seven, and the only reason I was at CVS at all was because I needed tampons.

  So there I was—tired, crampy, emotional, and wishing Dylan hadn’t seen the Twizzlers. He doesn’t even eat them, he just likes to play with them like they’re pipe cleaners or bendy straws, and he makes some pretty awesome creations out of them.

  But today I didn’t have the money for two packs, and after promising him we could get them later—a concept that, at only just seven years old, he doesn’t fully appreciate—I lost my cool when he started screaming—a high-pitched, single-note shriek that I know people think is weird, and makes me feel anxious—that people are staring, that he won’t stop, that I can’t control this situation.

  I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I know that. Of course I know that. But I did, just a little bit—even though all I did was shout his name, and grab his arm to pull him up from the floor, and then, before I knew it, there was a woman calling the hotline for DCF. That’s Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families, if you don’t know. I do.

  Of course, nothing happens the minute someone makes that call. It took the store manager getting involved, and then the police had to come, and we ended up being taken by police car to the station on Raymond Road, with a paunchy officer telling everyone to calm down, although the only one who was upset was Dylan, and he wasn’t listening to the policeman’s advice.

  I had my arm around my son, and he was both punching me and burrowing into me at the same time, and I stayed silent because I know by now saying anything in this type of situation is not a good idea. I just wanted to sit through the inevitable questions and comments, give the right answers and then go home, with DCF off my back, because that’s what happened before.

  But this time it didn’t.

  It didn’t because I was already on DCF’s radar, which I know sounds suspect. Even the most laid-back liberal person starts to look a little prim when they hear that DCF is involved. Their eyes n
arrow and their mouths purse and they say, well, what really happened? in a tone that suggests anything you say won’t be reason enough for someone’s child to be taken away, because only monsters have that happen to them.

  So here it is: the first time DCF was called, it was by Dylan’s father, Marco. Dylan was two years old and he’d started to demonstrate symptoms—of what, we didn’t know and still don’t. Back then he was too young for most diagnoses—autism, ADHD, the nebulous PDD, or pervasive development disorder, when they can’t decide what’s wrong. The pediatrician, when I took Dylan at eighteen months old, told us to wait and see, and I was happy to do that, relieved to kick that particular can further down the road. But Marco had had enough of the sleepless nights, the tantrums that started for no good reason and sometimes didn’t end for hours, the terror of many household things that led to the aforementioned shrieking, the constant clinging to me—and one night, in boozed-up desperation, he called DCF and said he wanted to commit “voluntary relinquishment.” He’d looked it up on the internet; it’s basically where you give up your own child.

  Fortunately, because I certainly didn’t want to give him up, and in any case, thankfully, it doesn’t actually work like that, no one took Dylan away. Still, DCF had a duty to get involved, and so we received a couple of visits. Our home, a shabby little duplex in Elmwood, was inspected, and we were referred to a pediatric psychiatrist all the way in Middletown, because none of the ones near us in West Hartford who accepted HUSKY—Connecticut’s Medicaid program for children—had room on their waiting lists.

  I went to that first appointment, even though I was dreading it. Dylan didn’t do well on the bus—Marco said he had to take the car to work, even though he’d known about the appointment—and then the hour-long wait, even with all the toys and books available, strung us both out even more until Dylan was clinging to me like a monkey and burying his head in my shoulder. By the time we arrived in the examining room, he was about two minutes away from a meltdown.

  And that’s just what he did, flinging himself on the floor while the psychiatrist, a stern-looking woman with permed hair and deep frown lines, looked on and wrote notes; the scratch of her pen made my own anxiety skyrocket. What was she writing—about what a terrible mother I was?

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” I said, as I both tried to catch Dylan’s arms to keep him from hurting himself and sound reasonable.

  “This isn’t about Dylan being on his best behavior,” she told me in a teacherish voice. She leaned forward, her expression intent as she spoke calmly. “Dylan, I see that you’re upset and tired. Maybe you’re frightened because of this new situation. But you cannot kick and hurt people, even when you feel that way.”

  Dylan didn’t listen to a word she said, not that he would have understood, at just two and a half years old. It was undoubtedly all straight out of a parenting manual, or Psychology 101, and basically useless when it comes to the actual moment, such as it was.

  I didn’t go back. DCF called and asked why I’d missed the next appointment, and then they visited us at home, and fortunately Dylan was having a good day, so they finally left us alone. For a while.

  The second and last time we came onto DCF’s radar was when Dylan was five. By that time we were completely off the grid when it came to parenting—the playgroups, the story times, the Mommy and Me sessions that most parents seemed to go to, their worlds revolving around each other and their kids—cut-up carrot sticks, picnics in the park, wine o’clock for the mommies. I saw it from a distance, but we passed it all by, existing in our solitary bubble, because that was what worked.

  I’d stopped with the yearly well checks at the pediatrician’s too, because they were too difficult, and Dylan had managed only two mornings of preschool, with me sitting next to him the whole time, talking to him quietly, before I realized that wasn’t going to work, either.

  Marco had left us when Dylan was three, making do with sporadic visits that tapered off to basically nothing within a year, and Dylan and I didn’t go out at all, except for the library and the park, the occasional necessary shopping, and basically it sometimes felt as if, to the rest of the world, we had simply ceased to exist.

  Which was why it was a surprise when DCF called eighteen months ago, because I hadn’t registered Dylan for kindergarten. Those two mornings at preschool had left enough of a footprint for them to check up on us, presumably since we were already written up in their notes somewhere.

  I was annoyed, and afraid, and frankly totally fed up. I mean, you read about these cases of kids being killed by their parents, locked in cupboards or chained to a table, covered in cigarette burns and bruises, and somehow DCF leaves them alone but comes after me, when anyone can see I am trying my best. They come after me, and instead of actually helping me, they just pretend to, tsk-tsking under their breath while they smile and ask their questions.

  That was the first time I met Susan and her kindly smile. She came to my door and she looked so compassionate and I felt so alone in that moment that I let my guard down. She made me a cup of tea while I sat at my kitchen table and sobbed. I hadn’t meant to; I hadn’t even realized I needed to. I thought, for the most part, that I was fine. Dylan and I both were.

  But she asked me how I was doing in a way that made me think she cared about my answer, and then she murmured soothing things about how hard it had to be, and somehow it all came spilling out. Marco leaving. Trying to work from home because childcare simply wasn’t an option. Dylan’s needs—mainly his need for me, the way he always clung, the way he worried about everything, the fears he had that knit us together as if we were fused at the bone. And while I couldn’t have imagined it any other way and I’m not even sure I would have even wanted it any other way, sometimes, only once in a while, it felt too hard.

  “It just never ends,” I remember saying, trying to hiccup back my sobs. “There’s never any break.”

  Susan asked gentle questions about support, and I had to confess I didn’t have any. My mother lives in New Hampshire with her second husband, who runs some kind of organic farm shop, and has no time for me, never mind Dylan. My father still lives in the house I grew up in, in Bloomfield, but isn’t interested and never will be. Friends? I lost them a long time ago, what ones I had. Work colleagues? I make cheap jewelry and sell it on Shopify, squeezing in my hours when Dylan is occupied or asleep. I don’t have any work colleagues.

  “What about neighbors?” Susan asked with her oh-so-sympathetic smile. I live in a duplex that has been divided into three apartments; Dylan and I are on the ground floor. I told Susan about Angela, the well-meaning elderly lady upstairs who has Alzheimer’s. She’s invited us in once or twice over the years, but her apartment is full of fussy little knickknacks and I don’t want Dylan to break anything by accident.

  My neighbor on the top floor is a man who drinks a lot of beer, judging from the recycling bin full of cans on our shared drive, and plays a lot of violent video games, judging from the noise that filters down through the ceiling. I don’t know what else he does, if anything.

  So, I explained to Susan, there was basically no one, and I know most everyone has trouble understanding that, how absolutely alone you can be when there are people all around you, when most normal people have parents and siblings, relatives and friends, a whole spiderweb of support that has been completely and utterly beyond me. But really that’s how it was, how it’s always been, at least since I was eighteen. No one.

  So Susan comforted me and then she told me she thought I needed some support, and she suggested a group that met at the community center in Elmwood, for parents and caregivers of autistic children. Except Dylan wasn’t autistic; I knew he wasn’t. I’d looked up the symptoms and they definitely weren’t his. He made eye contact; he didn’t have “sensory sensitivity”; he didn’t engage in soothing, repetitive activity, unless I counted building with Lego or doing jigsaws. Although he was often silent, it wasn’t from lack of ability. He could speak,
but he chose not to.

  Still, I knew, to the average observer, he could seem autistic, just because he was different, and shy, and a bit high-strung. I was sure Susan meant well, even if she didn’t understand us at all.

  I couldn’t take Dylan to a support group, not even one with people who would be understanding, with lots of soft toys and a soothing atmosphere and all the rest of it. Dylan gets nervous in crowds; he sticks to me like glue at the best of times, even when we’re alone. We only go to the park or library when they’re virtually empty, which means showing up right at opening or right before closing.

  Neither could I go to a support group without him, because nobody has taken care of him besides me since Marco left. Marco stopped visiting years ago, even though he also lives in Bloomfield, the next town over. Susan asked about that arrangement too, and I told her that Marco wasn’t involved beyond visits once or twice a year, although he did put some money in my bank account once in a while.

  So, for the last four years it has been Dylan and me for every single minute of every single day—and mostly, that’s fine. I like his company. He likes mine. Most of the time, we’re very happy together. I love my son, and I’ve figured out a routine that works for us both. Mostly.