After meeting with Nancy, I had to distract myself. I needed something to make me forget that I’d just given the green light for a man’s life to be ruined. I opened my laptop and began to type. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
From the digital abyss, their stories put a face to an acronym. PTSD. War veterans who had burst into violence after some external trigger, killing those around them without realising what they were doing; trauma victims who had completely shut down, with no memory of the time they had lost. One particularly chilling case described the moment a man recovered from an episode with a pillow in his hand and his lifeless child on the bed next to him.
I almost stopped reading at that point, barely able to stomach any more, but another link caught my eye. It told of a woman who had suffered from PTSD for years and then went on to become a victim of postnatal depression after the birth of her baby boy. She was a single mother and had struggled for months, refusing offers of support from the local children’s centres, clearly terrified of any social services involvement. At five months, Children’s Services did get involved, due to concerns regarding neglect. It wasn’t a case I was familiar with — she lived in a small town in the northeast of England — but one day, she woke to find her baby wasn’t in his cot. She desperately flew round the house, horrified that her baby boy wasn’t where she’d left him. She called the police, terrified that her son had been abducted while she slept. The police and Children’s Services arrived and searched the house, only to find the baby wrapped in a blanket, stashed in the recycling bin. He was dead.
My hand shot to my mouth as I read, horrified by the image of this lifeless infant hidden away in a bin. I read on, unable to tear my eyes from the brutal words. The post-mortem concluded that she hadn’t harmed him. He’d tragically died of cot death at some point during the night. But the strange part was that the mother had woken up, discovered this, flipped out, and had hidden his body in the bin, and then had gone back to sleep and forgotten that the whole thing had happened.
I shuddered as the thought trickled through me. What if something had happened to Teigan during our argument, and I’d blocked it out? Could I have hurt her?
A sharp, taunting voice echoed through my mind. I already knew the answer to that question.