23 Dougie's POV
I couldn't sleep, none of us could sleep. How could we sleep at a time at this? When we knew what we knew. We knew that Tom's wife had been filling his head with all these lies? Making him feel useless and worthless, like he wasn't capable of anything? To know that all this time, she had been telling him this, beating him down, leaving him as this shell of a human being, who was nothing more than a slightly emotional robot.
She had changed him into this person, had utterly broken him. To the point where he thought that we would take his son from him. We would have never, would have never had done anything else like that. We would have never thought to dare to do something like that. We wouldn't take Buzz, we would help Tom through this, we would help him cope; give him support when he needed it, because he couldn't do this alone, especially in this mind set. But we would have never thought of taking him.
"What do we do Harry? What do we do?" I was scared, so damn scared. What did we do? How could we stop Tom thinking like this? How did we bring the old him back, the one that didn't feel like this? The one who smiled, laughed, relaxed, played with his son? Could we bring him back? I didn't know, and I was scared to find out.
"We... we help him. We tell him that he's a good father. That he can do anything he sets his mind to. We try to cheer him up. We... I don't know, I don't have a clue how we help him." Harry ran his hands through his hair. His face was slightly green, like he felt sick at the thought of what had been done to Tom. I couldn't blame him; my stomach was churning at the thought of it all.
"Should we... the therapist, maybe he can help." I suggested, he'd seemed like he could help. And he had said that he would be available to talk to Tom if it was needed. At the moment if felt needed. Seriously needed.
"Yeah, yeah, we'll start with him... or maybe we should take him back to the one he saw when he was diagnosed, she knows more about Tom. Maybe, maybe he talked to her too, knew more about Tom's home life." Harry nodded, "If not, we'll find someone, someone who can help, who will know what to do."
"Would anyone actually know what to do?" I bit my lip, was there actually anybody who knew how to deal with stuff like this?
"I don't know. We'll have to ask. Right now, let's just... get hold of Fletch, and Carrie. See if either of them know the number of Tom's therapist, who diagnosed him." Harry got out his phone, texting our manager and Tom's sister, one of them must have had the number. We certainly didn't, we hadn't ever met Tom's therapist, hadn't really thought if important at the time, because it was personal to him. The same thing happened with me and mine, only Harry had met her, but only because he was my husband. Nobody else had.
"There's nothing else we can do right now, is there?" I wanted to do something, going to bed and waiting until morning felt wrong. It felt like we were letting Tom down, like we weren't doing anything to help him. Just texting someone about a phone number felt like a tiny thing to do. Surely there had to be something else, something more immediate.
"No, not right now. At least, not until morning." Harry sighed, "I wish there was something else, but there isn't. Not until morning, when we're all more awake, and ready to talk." He didn't actually sound like he believed the 'ready to talk' bit. I didn't. The way Tom was acting in there, he was so defensive, I didn't think he was going to listen to a thing from us. Hell I doubted he was even going to believe that we weren't going to take Buzz from him.
"We're in for a long ride." I whispered, hugging my knees.
"We are, but we'll make it out, we'll manage it, somehow." Harry promised, "Let's just see how the morning goes, and go from there. We can't plan anything without all the facts."