“I take it you’re his partner,” says the hospital doctor to Helen Archer, who delivers a world of complexity in her non-committal “erm”. The correct answer, of course, would be: “Absolutely not, thankfully.”
In fairness to Helen – nerves frayed after meeting her abusive former husband, Rob Titchener, for the first time in nearly seven years, only to witness him have a seizure and be taken to hospital – there is a lot to explain. That Rob is her ex-husband, who controlled and abused her, isolated her from friends and family, and repeatedly raped her. And that she was charged with attempted murder after stabbing him (maybe check Titchener’s medical history?), then gave birth to their son Jack in a mother-and-baby unit while on remand. At her trial, she was found to have acted in self-defence, but then Rob tried, and failed, to abduct Jack – or Gideon, as he calls him – before we all hoped we had seen the last of him.
