Chapter 12 — NICK'S FILE

Complaint 2025-LH-014.

Filed the eleventh of March by a child resident, age thirteen, initials N.V.

Category: staff conduct — physical.

Disposition: **unfounded.** Signed G. Moody, 19 March.

Six days.

There is a photocopy of the intake form stapled behind it, in a child's handwriting, and it is eleven lines long and it names a man, and I am not going to put the man's name in this because there is a criminal matter still open.

Nick Vasquez wrote a complaint about a member of staff at Larkfield House on the eleventh of March.

It was closed as never having happened on the nineteenth.

He ran on the twenty-third.

Four days.

He was thirteen years old, he had been in that house for fourteen months, he did the one thing the system tells children to do — *tell someone, put it in writing* — and eight days later he understood exactly what putting it in writing was worth, and he went out a laundry room window and he lived behind a bakery for seven months.

And in July, on his way past the staff corridor of a house he was no longer living in — he had gone back, once, for a jacket he had left, which is the most thirteen-year-old detail in this entire account — he took a photograph of a laminated roster on the wall.

That is the photograph on the cracked phone.

It is a staff rota for Larkfield House, week commencing 14 July, with a man's name on four consecutive night shifts.

A man who, according to the file in my husband's second drawer, had been "removed from resident-facing duties pending review" on 20 March.

He had not been removed from anything.

Nick photographed it because he thought that one day somebody might ask him to prove it.

Nobody had ever asked him.