The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

There is a wound that never heals in the heart of an abandoned child.

In the clatter of the club, he would find the other people at his table staring at him askance when he spoke like that, turning their backs in wounded delicacy, as if they couldn’t understand why he’d set out to ruin their fun. Even when he wasn’t speaking of his lost friends, Leonard lacked the silvery flint of frivolous conversation. He was too earnest. Too straight. The world was a bubble now, thin and glistening, and everyone else had found their way inside. But Leonard was too heavy for the bubble. He was a man out of time: too old to be one of the spirited young people and too young to fit in with the hopeless drunkards who lined the river. He felt a connection to nothing and to nobody.

It didn’t matter how often Leonard explained that opium was the only way he knew to dull the nightly terrors: the cold, wet trenches, the smell and the noise, the ear-shattering explosions that pulled at a man’s skull as he watched, helpless, while his friends, his brother, ran through the smoke and mud towards their end. If the woman from the painting pushed Tom out of the way at night . . . well, where was the harm in that?

I thought this was very insightful about PTSD and drug use.