'Running away from things, I seem to be doing it lot of that lately'

Again I found myself running away, but this time I felt split, half of me wanted to go back and talk to Darren but the other half of me was worried that if I did then he might not recognise me. I realised that I didn't know what or who Darren was anymore and that scared me. I had come so far in search of him. I had nowhere else to go, since leaving home I have burned all my bridges and if I decided to go home I would have to face going into foster care. For these reasons I became determined to make the most of the chance I had to find Darren.

I had no idea where I was, it was in the middle of the night and I was walking around the back alleys of Nottingham, scared and alone. The street lights were my only comfort and even they where either broken or fading out.

I tried and tried to come up with a sensible idea to get me out of this horrible mess wishing more and more that I had confronted Darren when I saw him, but no ideas came to mind although while I was thinking, I remembered something that the creepy car driver had said to me: 'Embrace your destiny', this meant nothing to me, but it got me thinking about what destiny really was and how it applied to me, was it just a word used by people to describe occurrences that they didn't understand? Or was it something that really exists? And everybody has a pre-set course to follow in life? Does this make our thoughts our own?

I spent a long time thinking about this but eventually decided on the latter explanation because if everything was already pre-set it meant that if finding Darren was really my destiny, then I could just walk on and on and eventually find him. This wasn't really much comfort because I was ready to collapse with exhaustion anyway and destiny or not I wasn't going to be able to cope much longer. Despite this I decided I would continue on in the hope of ... well in the hope of being able to continue further and find Darren eventually. This however was not the case and several minutes later I collapsed at the side of the road.

When I woke up everything was hazy, I was awake long enough to have some liquid poured down my throat which was painfully sore, and what tasted like a high energy food bar shoved in to my mouth, after I had eaten it I collapsed straight back down to the pillow and fell asleep again. This was a regular routine for what seemed like an eternity until I was awake long enough for my vision to come back in to focus and for me to be able to ask my captures or rescuers? A few questions.

'Where am I?'

'What happened?'

'Who are you?'

'What is the date?'

All of my questions were answered and from them I managed to gain the following information, I was at a house on the outskirts of Nottingham, the occupants, devout Christians, had picked me up on the road side after I had fainted, the worst news was however that it had been two weeks since I collapsed and the Cirque would be long gone and the people who picked me up and had done everything in my best interests up until now, wanted to ring my parents and tell them where I was.

Sure enough the day after I had woken up fully the questions about my parents just kept coming at me.

'We are sure they will be worried' they said 'They will want to know that you are safe' and the main question 'where do you live?'

I decided that the phrase 'I can't remember' could only be a very temporary solution and they wouldn't go on asking eventually resorting to calling a doctor around to assess my apparent amnesia. My plan was very simple, escape. But when and how weren't so simple to answer.

The answer came to me on Sunday morning, they were getting ready to go to church and as far as I could tell they weren't planning on taking me with them so I kept my eyes shut and pretended that I was asleep, my deception worked and they left for church nice and early in the morning, giving me a chance to have a nice lie in and to get myself together ready for my escape, an hour later I scribbled a thank you note and I was walking out the door ready to go off in search of Darren once more but if I thought that finding Darren when I first set off to find him almost three weeks ago was going to be hard, this was going to be a whole lot harder.

It didn't take me long to realise that if I was to ever going to speak to Darren again that I was going to have to enlist the help of those who I would rather not have to ask for help and I was going to have to probe into every last detail of Darren's death starting with... Steve Leonard.