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Mother Fear: The Christmas Angel
The following text is copyright © Matt Bromley 2025. Do not reproduce without permission.
25 December 2025
The rain had been steady for days, slicking the pavements and pooling in the corners of the garden. A hard frost had threatened with every dusk, turning the hedges white-edged and brittle by morning.
Inside, though, the house was warm, filled with light and the scent of cinnamon, pine, and roasting poultry. Tom and Kate had done everything they could to make the house festive for their son Adam – on the cusp of becoming a teenager and unbelieving of magic, but full of anticipation nonetheless – and for Tom’s parents, Duncan and Veronica, who had arrived the day before Christmas Eve and needed to feel the warmth of family more than ever.
Tom affected cheerfulness, attentively playing the role of the father of the house with care. He handed round chocolates and topped up wine glasses. He played board games and laughed at cliched Christmas cracker jokes. But beneath it all, something was missing. Or rather, someone. Oliver.
For twelve years, Tom had spent every Christmas with his son. Even after his separation from Maggie, that time had always been protected – sacred, almost. But now, over two months had passed since Tom had last seen or heard from his son, that being a failed mediation session – not a happy memory to relish, but a painful experience which only served to emphasise the yawning chasm that had opened between Tom and his son.
And since then, nothing.
As Christmas had approached, despite recent experience, Tom had allowed the warmth of hope to insulate him from the cold reality of his situation. He had, until yesterday, retained a flicker of faith, albeit a small and delicate flame, that Oliver would change his mind, or defy his mother, and reach out to Tom to make amends, if just for the festive period. Surely, he thought, Oliver wouldn’t allow Christmas to pass without seeing his dad and his grandparents.
But the hope, feint as it was, died on Christmas Eve; that flicker of faith was smothered, snuffed out of existence by a curt text from Margaret, Maggie’s mother. The message was delivered with all the warmth of ice: “Oliver has decided he doesn’t want to see you or your new family this Christmas or New Year. Please respect his decision. And please don’t reply, I have nothing further to say.”
Tom showed the text to Kate and said he knew, as he always had, that it wasn’t Oliver’s voice he heard in those words, but rather Maggie’s. Margaret was simply the conduit for her sociopathic daughter, a vessel through which Maggie could inflict more pain like a poltergeist.
But Tom felt less conviction in this belief these days than he was prepared to admit. He had hoped those words were Maggie’s, not Oliver’s. But he no longer knew this with any certainty. In fact, he no longer knew anything with certitude. Perhaps he’d been looking at it all from the wrong angle, as if through a mirror; perhaps his perception was back-to-front. Perhaps the court appointed social worker, Julia Sutton, had been right about him, and he was the problem. Perhaps he was authoritarian, more interested in proving Maggie’s guilt than in listening to his son’s feelings. He’d always thought himself to be a good man, honourable and moral, caring and kind. But maybe he’d been wrong.
And yet, surely, he told himself, no child wakes up and forgets twelve years of love unless there’s someone working hard in the shadows to make him forget, a puppet master dressed all in black pulling strings in the darkness. Besides, it wasn’t just his perception but Kate’s and his parent’s, not to mention his friends’. It had been his step-daughter Charlie’s perception once, too. Until Maggie had lied to and manipulated her, too.
Having shown Kate, Tom had continued to stare at Margaret’s text message until his phone screen had dimmed and died. Then he’d put his phone away and quietly removed Oliver’s stocking from the fireplace, and his presents from under the tree – presents Tom had lovingly bought, carefully wrapped, and painstakingly added to the pile more out of hope than expectation. He had not wanted to put a hex on the day: he thought that if he assumed Oliver wouldn’t be coming and therefore didn’t cater for him, he might have cursed the outcome. But, after receiving Margaret’s message, he had silently removed Oliver’s gifts because he hadn’t wanted his parents to fixate on the presents left unopened, the joy left unfelt, or the love left un-given. Tom knew he had to do all he could to shield Duncan and Veronica from the worst of the pain. He must remain light and positive, upbeat and optimistic.
Duncan moved slower now, each step more considered since his cardiac arrest. He was recovering daily – stubbornly, stoically – but Tom could see the effort it now cost him to smile, to sit up straight, to pretend that nothing had changed. He winced sometimes when he thought no one was looking. But he carried on. For the love of his wife.
Veronica, although a nervous presence, always ill at ease in company, was, nevertheless, loquacious – perhaps filling each silence for fear of what the stillness might do if left to expand. But this Christmas she was noticeably quieter, more distant and reflective. She often lost the thread of a sentence halfway through and repeated herself without realising it. When someone caught her eye, she would smile for too long, and hers would be a shallow smile which failed to reach her eyes. And those eyes told their own tale: sunken and black, they were always watery and distant, like glass eyes, merely a façade, offering the pretence of seeing. If eyes were the gateway to the soul, Tom worried what their opacity might mean.
In unguarded moments, Tom would catch her looking at something just beyond his shoulder, something or someone just out of reach, and Tom would feel his heart tighten, his eyes sting. Her anxiety came in waves, her sadness like a tide – retreating, only to return when no one expected it.
Neither Duncan nor Veronica asked directly about Oliver. Tom had asked them not to, for Kate and Adam’s sake, if not his. As he’d told them the news that Oliver wouldn’t be coming for Christmas this year, despite his earlier promises to the contrary, he’d seen the grief sitting just beneath Duncan’s silence, seen the way Veronica paused at the sight of a certain tree ornament – one Oliver had made at primary school with glitter and glue.
Later, after leaving the room to make drinks, when Tom had returned, he’d stalled in the doorway, given pause by the sight of his mum standing by the Christmas tree, holding that homemade bauble in her hand, as if weighing it, before placing it gently, almost reverently, on a branch near the top, just beneath the angel, in her shadow of her wings.
Tom wanted to protect his parents, and indeed Kate, from the full weight of his own feelings, just as he wanted to shield Adam, who knew something was wrong but had the good grace not to ask. Unless Kate had told him more than she’d admitted to. Adam was a kind boy, thoughtful and funny; he was growing more confident by the day, finding his personality and asserting himself more forcefully. Tom loved him as fiercely as if he were his own son. But love did not divide – it did not erase the hollow where another son should have been.
Tom had woken early, the first to rise as usual. He had come downstairs, lit the tree, made coffee, and then sat alone in the quiet glow of the fairy lights. And it was there, before the day began, that the ache deepened into a sharp, breathless grief. It wasn’t just the absence; it was the violence of the absence, the deliberate nature of it. A mother turning her child against his father. A child withheld, not lost. Love denied access.
He imagined what Oliver might be doing at that very moment – tearing wrapping paper from gifts, trying on new clothes, playing new games; he was always early to rise on Christmas Day, had never lost the magic of the morning. This morning, would he think of Tom? Would he acknowledge, give shape to, what was missing, even if he couldn’t articulate it or mention his father’s name in Maggie’s presence? Or would he not give Tom a moment’s thought? Out of sight, out of mind.
Tom would never know. And that unknowing was its own kind of torment. He didn’t cry, although the tears were never far from falling; they welled inside him, dammed by a determination to protect Kate and Adam, and Duncan and Veronica, as well as by a fear that once he started crying, he may never stop. But the wall of tears grew heavier with each memory left unmade, with each moment missed, and slowly but relentlessly the tide became harder to hold back.
The coffee had long gone cold in his hands by the time the rest of the house stirred. As he heard footsteps on the stairs, and Adam’s excited whisper, Tom took a deep breath, found some hidden resolve, and stood up to go meet his other son on the threshold of the living room.
Opening the door, and seeing Adam with a sleepy smile on his face, Tom forced a smile of his own and asked, “Do you think he’s been?”
The day passed gently, quietly. Adam was delighted with his gifts. They played games and watched Christmas films, and Tom smiled, even laughed. He took photos. He carved the turkey. And all the while, he carried the ache like a hidden bruise, unseen and unspoken.
31 December 2025
A frost painted the rooftops silver and made the air sharp enough to bite. Fireworks cracked faintly in the distance; bursts of colour smothered quickly by fog.
Inside, Adam stood at the window, eyes wide, Kate beside him with her arm around his shoulder. Duncan had gone to bed early, tired from a long day. Veronica had joined him, jumpy at the sudden sound of fireworks exploding into life. Neither had felt compelled to stay up past midnight. “It’s just another day,” Duncan had said as he’d risen to leave the room.
Tom stayed near the doorway, watching as Adam laughed softly and Kate smiled at him through the flicker of light.
At midnight, he raised a glass, kissed Kate, hugged Adam close. He said the right words, smiled the right smile. But later, when the house had fallen into that deep silence only winter brings, and Kate and Adam had headed upstairs to get ready for bed, Tom stepped outside alone.
The air was brittle with cold. The garden glistened with frost. He looked up, exhaling a breath that hung in the still night. Somewhere, out there, Oliver was entering a new year too – fatherless, not by fate, but by force. And perhaps he didn’t know the full truth yet. Perhaps he didn’t even know that he was missed, that he was wanted, that he was loved.
Tom said nothing into the darkness. He just stood there and let himself feel it all – the grief, the fury, the love that had nowhere to go. Then he did the only thing he could.
He made a promise.
That he would remain. That he would continue to love Oliver, quietly, fiercely, without condition. That the door would always be open. That the light in the window would stay lit, even if the wait was long.
And that when his son found his way back – if he ever did – he would not find bitterness waiting, but a father, standing as he always had, in the cold, holding love like a lantern in the dark.
bee | Bromley Education Enterprises Limited 