David felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Her baby, barely able to put two words together, had just whispered something that no child so small should know. The lady of the wall. The words echoed in his head like an alarm.
Dr. Mitchell was deeply upset.
“It could be a sign of a trauma he has suffered,” she said. You mentioned that there was a succession of nannies.
“Yes,” replied David slowly. All of them have resigned. Ethan cried when they entered the room, especially with one of them. Amélie… I hardly remember her. She only stayed for a week. Ethan didn’t sleep anymore, hardly ate anything.
Dr. Mitchell’s eyebrows furrowed.
— Do you have any video recordings from that period?
David’s blood ran cold. The baby monitor, of course. With trembling fingers, he rummaged through the old videos saved online. File after file was gone. Only one recording remained, dating back eight months. His cursor hung above it. Did he really want to see this? He pressed play.
The screen came alive in grainy black and white. A tall woman, dressed in a black sweater, entered the room. She was moving like a predator, too calm, abnormally calm. Ethan was playing on the floor with his colored blocks. The woman approached. And then everything changed. The exact second she approached, Ethan froze like prey. Every muscle in her little body stiffens.
Then, in a movement dictated by pure panic, he crawled to the corner and smashed his face against the wall, as if to hide, to protect himself. The woman stood there, watching, waiting. And David’s soul was broken. She smiles. Not a human smile. A smile belonging to nightmares.
But what followed was even worse. Amelie approached the corner where Ethan was hiding. She leaned over and whispered something directly toward the wall against which her son pressed his face. Ethan’s little body began to tremble.
Then she did something that made David’s blood run cold. She grabbed Ethan by the shoulders and forced him to stay in that corner for almost three full minutes as he tried to escape. When she finally released him, she patted him on the head like a docile animal and left the frame.
David’s hand shook so violently that he almost let go of the computer.
Dr. Mitchell finished her thought:
“It’s child abuse, David. It’s a trauma. You should report this immediately.
David takes himself.
“No. No one will ever hurt my son again.