Read Online The Keeper of Secrets by Amanda Brooke - Free Book Online

buttoning up her coat as she stepped out into the storm. She walked towards the river and carried on walking. Elle was two miles away before she found what she had been looking for: a section of the promenade that was completed deserted. She leaned over the railings and looked down into the raging waters below. Her frozen hands wrapped tightly around the cold metal. She wasn’t thinking, her mind as numb as her fingers. All she could see was the thread of her life unravelling year by year, zigzagging at a furious rate. She put her booted foot on the lower bar of the railings, which lifted her a few inches higher. She didn’t want to think, she didn’t want to be shocked out of the trance. Denial was a state of mind that had served her well for years. Elle had only enough strength to keep one thought and one person in her mind’s eye. Charlie. His face acted like a dam but the pressure kept building until she couldn’t hold it back any more. She stared down into the grey depths of the Mersey and then without warning the first emotions were ripped from her body and her screams were whipped away by a pitiless arctic gale.

9
    The distant clatter of a spaceship crashing to earth was swiftly followed by a small boy’s mournful cries. Next came a frustrated sigh closer to home. ‘What the hell is wrong with that child?’ Rick asked.
    â€˜I’ll go and check.’
    â€˜No, leave him!’ he barked. ‘He’s got to learn that you’re not at his beck and call.’
    Elle didn’t respond. She had done very little talking in the last few days. She had screamed herself hoarse as she stood at the edge of the river and if she wasn’t talking to Charlie, she found she had barely any energy or inclination to speak at all.
    â€˜Do you have to skulk around with that miserable look on your face?’
    There wasn’t even a flicker of a reaction from Elle. She was staring intently at the magazine on her lap where impossibly happy faces smiled up at her.
    â€˜It’s your own fault. I told you not to go to your dad’s house, you haven’t got the mettle for it. Thank God it’s been cleared now. I’m telling you, Elle, you’re not to go back there again. That part of your life is over. It’s time to move on. Elle? Are you even listening to me?’
    Elle had been listening. In fact it was fair to say she was seeing and hearing things far more clearly than she had in a very long time. She closed the magazine. ‘I’m going up to him,’ she said, pushing herself off the sofa and turning her back on Rick. She heard his spluttering demand that she stay where she was with crystal clarity but she went anyway.
    â€˜What is it, Charlie?’ she asked when he was safely wrapped up in his duvet and his mother’s arms. It was a question she had asked every night for the last three weeks. She kissed the top of his sweaty head.
    â€˜Nothing,’ he lied, as he always did.
    â€˜If I read you another story will you promise to go to sleep?’
    Charlie nodded and sniffed back his drying tears. Recent experience told her that he wouldn’t, but she didn’t mind. She’d have been only too happy to spend the whole night lying next to him, reading stories that would whisk them both off to magical worlds where it was easy to tell who were the heroes and who were the villains.
    But there would be no escape tonight for Elle. She heard the creak of a floorboard as Rick crept upstairs to invade their sanctuary. The flutter of a shadow danced on the wall as he hovered near the door.
    She finished a chapter and turned the page, as eager as Charlie for the next instalment. ‘Enough for one night,’ Rick said.
    Charlie’s groan was punctuated by a note of panic.
    â€˜I won’t be far,’ she promised.
    It broke her heart to leave him but she knew she had to, not because Rick had told her to but because she accepted that she