The One Who Answers: Vol. 1. The Hawthorn Trilogy, #1

Debbie Fielding is the woman everyone calls when something goes wrong. On Birmingham's Hawthorn estate, she keeps spare keys, remembers medications, knows which relatives are safe - and answers the phone before it has time to ring twice. Being useful is more than a habit. It is the place she has made for herself in other people's lives. Then a community coach carrying forty local residents crashes on the journey home.
As passengers are taken to different hospitals, police uncover a startling problem: Debbie's number appears in seventeen separate contact records. Some permissions are current. Some are years old. Some were copied forward, assumed, or given for one specific task. But now frightened relatives, hospital staff, neighbours and reporters are all looking to Debbie for answers. One injured woman left explicit instructions about whom not to contact.
Her teenage son is waiting to be collected. Debbie's daughter is preparing to leave Birmingham after years of coming second to everyone else's emergencies. And every decision Debbie makes could protect someone - or betray the trust she believes she is defending. When the press transforms her into the heroic woman seventeen people depended upon, Debbie must confront the truth behind the story: some people chose her, some never did -  and answering a call is not the same as having the right to decide.
Sharp, compassionate and darkly funny, The One Who Answers is a gripping novel about community, consent, invisible labour - and the devastating cost of always being the person who steps in.