Dionne Fehring, 52, Brisbane, Qld.
I smiled as I cradled my 12-week-old son, Patrick, in my arms and watched my 17-monthold daughter, Jessie, run around with her cousins and her green hand-knitted crochet monster.
We called it The Grinch, and she never went anywhere without it.
It was March 2004, and in the last couple of weeks, I’d seen such a change in her.
She was always smiling and dancing around to her favourite Frank Sinatra song, not like she’d been before, when we lived with her father, Jayson.
Just a week earlier, I’d bundled the kids into the car and driven from Brisbane to the Gold Coast, where my mum lived with her partner, Paul, after Jayson, my husband, had called me.
“Tonight’s the night,” he told me cryptically.…
