[name_f]My[/name_f] name - [name_f]Freya[/name_f] [name_u]Wren[/name_u]
Husband’s name - [name_u]Eliot[/name_u] [name_m]Oliver[/name_m]
Together we have five beautiful children;
10 year old, [name_u]Finn[/name_u] [name_u]Sullivan[/name_u]
7 year old, [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] [name_u]Justice[/name_u]
3 year old, [name_m]Cian[/name_m] [name_m]Callahan[/name_m]
And 4wk old twin girls, [name_f]Luna[/name_f] [name_f]Alexandra[/name_f] & [name_f]Margot[/name_f] [name_f]Arianna[/name_f]
One day we are all out at the mall with the kids. [name_u]Finn[/name_u] is pushing the twins, my husband’s walking beside me, I’m carrying [name_m]Cian[/name_m], and [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] is walking in front. Suddenly the fire alarm goes off in the mall and I can see flames raising from the ground floor! I see [name_u]Eliot[/name_u] faintly with the other kids running, I still have [name_m]Cian[/name_m] in my arms but things become blurry and I pass out.
When I wake up I’m outside the mall surrounded by police men, medics and firefighters. They stopped the burning building and nobody died. I turn my head and see [name_u]Eliot[/name_u] and the kids, and am about to go running but stop, [name_u]Eliot[/name_u] is crying and there is only 4 children beside him. One is missing!
[name_f]My[/name_f] little boy, three year old [name_m]Cian[/name_m] [name_m]Callahan[/name_m] is missing after the fire, police assure us that he is not in the building and reveal that after extensive investigation they are now treating it as a kidnapping. We are gobsmacked.
In the months to follow I become an emotional wreck, [name_m]Cian[/name_m] was with me when he went missing, I failed to protect him and now he’s gone. [name_f]My[/name_f] sister moves in with me to help me take care of [name_f]Luna[/name_f] and [name_f]Margot[/name_f] while [name_u]Eliot[/name_u] agrees that it be best if he move with [name_u]Finn[/name_u] and [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] into his parents while I recover. Our marriage breaks down. We do press conferences together begging the public for information on our missing little boy, we release photograph after photograph in the hope that somebody will recognise him… And after two months, someone finally does.
Two months after [name_m]Cian[/name_m] first went missing, we receive a call from the police late on evening saying they have strong evidence to believe they have found our son, my heart stops beating. Alive? Yes.
[name_u]Eliot[/name_u] and I go to the police station leaving our four other children with my sister and their grandparents, at the station we wait half an hour before a middle aged woman comes in carrying a bundle underneath a dark blanket. Before she has barely taken two steps into the room I am up and rip the blanket from her hands revealing the face of a terrified child. [name_f]My[/name_f] child. [name_m]Cian[/name_m].
The hours and days after [name_m]Cian[/name_m]'s return to us are a blur. Police say that the people who took our son have been apprehended, I press them for information on who they are and what they wanted, fearing the worse and that our little boy had been tortured or worse. But the police reassured me that the couple who had taken [name_m]Cian[/name_m] had recently lost their son of a similar age and were “emotionally confused”, [name_m]Cian[/name_m] had been treated well, fed, and slept in the couple’s son’s bedroom. They hadn’t allowed him out but after two months of climbing the walls they let him into their small yard to play, which is when their neighbour spotted him and recognised [name_m]Cian[/name_m] from the news.
Though I am delighted to have the family back together it takes us a lot of time to recover, first individually and then as a whole, last to be fixed is mine and [name_u]Eliot[/name_u]'s marriage.
As the oldest, [name_u]Finn[/name_u] bore the brunt of the collapse of the family and my inability to take care of them, a lot of damage sustained to him was irreversible because of his age and he never really turned back to “normal”. [name_u]Finn[/name_u] became terribly introverted and reclusive, he found it difficult to talk to us about anything, but within time this got gradually better until we were having up to four conversations a day.
[name_u]Seven[/name_u] year old [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] did the opposite of his big brother to cope with what had happened, he became vicious and bed tempered, the first thing he did when he saw [name_m]Cian[/name_m] was bite him. We paid for a lot of behavioural therapy for [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] to go back to the way he was, and while it worked on some level, something had broken inside of my middle baby boy. After several years, most of which was spent in uncomfortable silence between the two boys, [name_u]Finn[/name_u] and [name_m]Wolf[/name_m] started to help each other, they could communicate without words and became each others rock.
[name_m]Cian[/name_m] understood that he had been taken by poorly people who were sad to have lost their own son, what they did wasn’t right but we shouldn’t hate them because they had been poorly, [name_m]Cian[/name_m] was the first to accept this, it took the rest of us a long time to cool the burning fury towards the people who’d shattered my family. People treated [name_m]Cian[/name_m] differently but after several months he returned to his normal, happy go lucky self, the dynamic of the family had changed and this is what he struggled with most, he for the most part he was the most unaffected of us all.
[name_f]My[/name_f] babies, at only four weeks old when [name_m]Cian[/name_m] disappeared, didn’t know anything that was going on, all they knew what that their source of food, warmth and love was no longer a constant, and all love smiling faces had been replaced with cold bodies. But they had each other, and this is how they coped.
[name_u]Eliot[/name_u] and I fought and struggled and fought some more. We slept in separate rooms for the first eighteen months, me in with [name_m]Cian[/name_m] and him in our double bed, we barely talked or even looked at each other. Things were very difficult. Until one day, about sixteen/seventeen months after the incident, [name_u]Finn[/name_u] came to us, and in one of the first full sentences he’d spoken to us since, said “Mum, Dad, we’re okay now, time to fix you.” And we took our oldest son’s advice, went to marriage counselling, started talking, and eventually, on the third anniversary of the mall fire, renewed our wedding vows to each other and to our five children.