Read Online Repeating History (History #1) by Hanleigh Bradley - Free Book Online

Merry Christmas for me, would you?”
    “Sure.”
    “Merry Christmas Clara.”
    “Merry Christmas Andrew.”
     
    “Come on Andrew,” Maya is smirking at me, “get off your phone.”
    “Yeah little brother! It’s Christmas Day!” Jacob laughs as he goes to grab my phone.
    I pull it away just in time. Mother looks at me with concern. She’s wearing a flowing patterned skirt and a jumper. She’s bare foot and carrying a tray of roast potatoes through from the kitchen. “Maya, Jacob leave your brother alone.”
    “Do you need some help mum?” I ask, putting my phone down. Aurora is okay. She’s been out of theatre for a while now but she’s still asleep. Landon has decided to stay in L.A. until Aurora is well enough to come back to England. He’s asked me to watch over TRW and my phone is a constant buzz of messages from all the other directors asking after Aurora and Landon.
    “Oh no darling,” she shakes her head, “It’s all ready.” I love my mum. She’s amazing. She’s goodness personified but she’s also weak. She’s fragile. I spent most of my childhood trying to protect her. Protect her mostly from herself. She’s never been scared to love, but that love that she always gave so freely was never freely returned. My father might have been the only man to ever truly love her but he had died. He’d left her. Left her broken and incomplete. She’d tried to heal herself, mend her broken heart. She’d started hobbies; one after another they all proved incapable of filling the void. As lonely as she always had been, she’d never been alone. She’s had more great loves than I can count but each and every one of them took something away from her until she was just the shell of the woman she once was. I take in the sight of her. She’s thinner than last time I saw her. She looks tired. I wonder if she’s been sleeping. Christmas is always a difficult time for her. Dad died on Christmas Day fourteen years ago. It’s never been an easy time of year for our family. My mother usually spends most of it crying or in her bed, whilst we all try desperately to distract her. I remember a time when it was different. It’s a distant memory. I’m not even sure it’s real or if I’ve just made it up in the back of my mind. But things used to be different. Christmas used to be different. The house would smell like mulled wine and cinnamon. Mum loves cinnamon. We’d always have the biggest tree and a ridiculous number of perfectly wrapped presents under it. But then dad had died, he’d had a heart attack on Christmas morning and after that mum always forgot to get a tree. The first Christmas that followed we didn’t have a tree or presents. Mum spent the whole of two week vacation in bed. After that Jacob started buying the presents. He would save up his allowance all year so that we could have presents even if we didn’t have a tree. I wasn’t much younger than him, barely three years, and so I’d cottoned on quickly and together we acted as Santa for the Contius household. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, four years after my father died that our mother tried to take her own life. Jacob and I were downstairs, it was the middle of the night and I think she thought we were all asleep, but Jacob and I were wrapping presents. Maya had crept down the stairs in search of Santa. We hadn’t heard her. She was so small and quiet, amazingly stealthy for a eleven year old. When she saw us, she cried out in shock. She’d had no idea there was no such thing as Santa. Before waiting for an explanation, she’d ran up the stairs and into our mother’s room. That’s when she found her lying unconscious surrounded by her own blood. I can still recall the sound of her blood curdling scream as I ran up the stairs after her.
    “I do love it when you all come to visit me.” She’s so good at putting a brave face on it but her eyes are bloodshot and her cheeks are puffy and I know she’s been crying in the last few