Sometimes a secret is just a story we haven't told yet.

Here is what I will tell you about myself, upfront, before anyone else gets the chance.

I am a social worker. I know how to follow the rules, which means I also know which ones you can break if you have a good enough reason and no one is looking.

I have a husband. Two children. A mother I haven't seen since I was eleven. A file with my name on it that I have never read.

And I have a client called Rose who is twenty-three years old and losing access to her son.

Rose’s case is not so different from all the others, except that I can't think about it without wanting to cry in a car park. Except that I have broken a big rule, and now people might start looking at me more closely.

I’m not normally like this.

For readers of Sorrow and Bliss or The Wedding People, this is a profoundly funny and uncomfortably recognisable debut novel about fixing and breaking things, about family and growing up, about the stories we tell ourselves and the truths we forget.