When fifteen-year-old Skye's mother finally does something so shocking that it can't be hushed up, the police turn Skye over to the social workers - and that's when the nightmare begins. No one will let her talk to her father. And the woman who is supposed to be helping her dumps her in a terrifying 'home' that's more like a jail.

But she still has one friend to turn to: the sympathetic girl she's met in an internet chat room, the one who seems to have a home life as unhappy as Skye's. So when Jade offers Skye - now alone in Manchester and nearly penniless - a safe place to stay, Skye is willing to trust her. Even when it isn't Jade who turns up at the rendezvous, but a grown-up man who says he's Jade's brother .