My parents threw me out at sixteen after I lost my leg. Nineteen years later they wanted a million dollars for my sister — to hide why a 24 -year-old woman may never walk again.

It was a real charity. That is the part people find hardest.

For the first two years it was entirely real, and it helped eleven people, and then my sister worked out that nobody checks a charity with a sad story and a good logo.

They stole my identity when I was a child to buy my sister clothes.

And then they did it again, in 2014, at scale, in public, with a logo and a gala and a paragraph about my life — and ran it for eleven years.

PART 4

Then there is Tamsin.

Tamsin Reyes. Twenty-four. She was a barista and a part-time sports coach and she came off a moped in the January of 2023.

Her leg was saved. There was a window — about fourteen months — in which a particular reconstruction had a good chance of getting her walking properly again. That is the short version and it is not mine to give in full.