She Deserves To Be Loved

The story of a woman who has seen the worst of people — and chosen to fill her life with the best of them.

She found him in a flat that was wrong in every way.

The call had come in as a noise complaint. She knocked on the door, wasn’t satisfied with the answer she got, asked the neighbours a few questions, and knocked again. The flat was immaculately clean — unnervingly so — and there was no child in sight. But someone had reported hearing a child being hurt.

She asked her colleague to look around. And a three-year-old came out.

He was wearing a tracksuit. He had small glasses. He looked, she says, just like Harry Potter. And when she saw what had been done to him — thirty-eight injuries to his small body, bruising so deep it had turned the inside of his ear pitch black — she felt something she had never quite felt before on the job.

“He clung to me like I was his mum. Like he was desperate for me to get him out of that place.”

She got him out. She got him checked over. She did the paperwork, made sure he didn’t go back, and then went home. On Saturday she was in mum mode. On Monday she was at a new job. That is how this works. You get on with it.

But this one stayed. It is still with her now, years later. She thinks about him sometimes when she walks through the city and sees a child with glasses who might be the right age. She heard he was fostered, that he was going to the beach and having a lovely time. She hopes that’s still true. She can’t watch Harry Potter anymore.

In all the years she has been a frontline police officer — the murders, the suicides, the scenes that would stop most people in their tracks — it is the smallest, most vulnerable person who got through the armour she didn’t even know she’d built.

That tells you everything you need to know about who she is.

The Woman Her Mother Made

Ask her who influenced her growing up and she doesn’t hesitate. Her mum. Her mum is the answer, the full answer, and everything that follows flows from that.

Her mum had her at twenty, worked the whole way through, laid down foundations she still stands on today — about debt, about property, about friendship, about what it means to show up for people. She was the nucleus of the family, the one who kept everybody together, the one who would give you her last fiver and mean it.

“Without my mum, I wouldn’t be who I am today. She’s taught me everything.”

And here is where the thread begins. Because what her mother gave her, she is now passing to her own children. The home cooked meals. The values. The morals. The way of life. The understanding that how you behave to your children, and how you talk to them, and how you show them the world, is more or less who they become. She has seen the other version of this story too many times at work. She knows exactly what it looks like when the foundations aren’t there.

Her kids, she says, are going great. She has never had any real issues with either of them. She says this simply, without fanfare. She knows what it cost to get here.

The Life She Was Going To Have

She was going to have a lovely life in the country by the beach. She had just got married at twenty-four. Her daughter was one. Her husband was a marine. She had a B&B in Cornwall that had only been running a year and was already doing well. Life, she thought, was just beginning.

Then she found out he had been cheating on her. More than once.

She didn’t deliberate. She didn’t try to forgive and see. She looked at what staying would make her — a person checking phones, spiralling, turning into a shell — and she made the decision immediately. Done. No option not to.

“I would end up making his life hell. I’d be worrying about what he was doing behind my back. I’d go in bloody Glenbourne. I don’t want to go through life worrying about that.”

She turned thirty in January. She was divorced by April. Six months, start to finish, pushed through with the same uncompromising efficiency she brings to everything else.

It happened again with her son’s father. Same pattern, different man. And that, she acknowledges, is where the cold came in. Where a certain persona formed, a harder outer layer. She is good at compartmentalising, she says. Very good at just getting on.

What is remarkable is what she did not do. She did not take any of it into the next relationship in the form of distrust. She wiped the slate clean and started fresh. Every time. She is quite specific about this, quite clear-eyed. She knows what she had to survive. She also knows she has never been unfair to anyone who came after.

What She Fills Her Life With

She sees death all the time. Violence, abuse, drugs, the worst that people do to each other and to themselves. She does not watch the news because it feels like coming home to more work.

So she fills her life with the opposite. Friends. Organising things. Fun. Her mum and dad. Her kids. Her partner. The dog. A camper van she wants to buy so she can bugger off somewhere on a Friday — Cornwall, Scotland, Italy, anywhere — because life is short and she knows it more specifically than most people do.

“You don’t know how long you’ve got left on this planet. Life is too short.”

This is not a cliche when she says it. It is operational knowledge.

She also holds, quietly and without much fuss, a belief that there is something more. She didn’t believe in it until her thirties. Now she does — some kind of presence, some kind of after. She has been to psychics who knew things they couldn’t have known. She has felt something she couldn’t explain. She has promised her friends she will come back and haunt them, just to prove it.

She says this and laughs. But she means it too.

What She Wants You to Know

She is fiercely loyal. She is honest to a fault — bluntly, directly honest, in the way that some people find uncomfortable and others find like clean air. She is funny. She is a good mum, a good friend, a good daughter. She is strong in ways that were not chosen but were built, necessity by necessity, over the course of a life that has asked a lot of her.

And underneath all of it, in the first thing she said when asked to complete the sentence — I am a woman who — she put the thing she has been working towards, the thing that cost her something to believe again after everything:

“I’m a woman who deserves to be loved. Yeah. And wants to get married and live happily ever after. Because I deserve that.”

She does. She absolutely does.

And the small boy with the glasses — wherever he is now, growing up somewhere better — he deserved it too. She made sure of that. On a Friday afternoon, without anyone watching, she went in when something felt wrong and she didn’t leave until he was safe.

That is also who she is.