How to Fall in Love. Cecelia Ahern

him for a reaction.

      ‘That was your husband. But I think you already know that. He said he’s keeping the goldfish and he’s getting his solicitors to draw up paperwork to ensure you’re legally never allowed to own a fish again. He thinks he might be able to prevent you entering a pet shop too. He’s not sure about winning at funfairs but he’ll personally be there to beat you and make sure you don’t win.’

      ‘Is that it?’

      ‘In the second message he called you a bitch twenty-five times. I didn’t count. He did. He said it was twenty-five times. He said you were a bitch multiplied by twenty-five. Then he said it twenty-five times.’

      I took the phone from him and sighed. Barry didn’t seem to be cooling down at all. In fact, he seemed to be getting worse, more frantic. Now it was the goldfish? He hated that goldfish. His niece had bought it for him for his birthday and the only reason she’d bought him a fish was because Barry’s brother hated fish too so it was technically a gift for her, to be stored in our home for her to look at and feed when she visited. He could keep the damn fish.

      ‘Actually,’ Adam snatched the phone back from me with a mischievous look in his eye, ‘I want to count, because wouldn’t it be funny if he got it wrong?’

      He listened to the voicemail again on speakerphone and each time Barry spat the word out viciously, with venom and bitterness and sadness dripping from every single letter, Adam counted on his hands with a big smile on his face. He ended the call looking disappointed.

      ‘Nah. Twenty-five bitches.’ He handed it back to me and looked out the window.

      We were silent for a few minutes and my phone beeped again.

      ‘And I thought I had problems,’ he said.

       8

       How to Sincerely Apologise When You Realise You Have Hurt Someone

      ‘So this is him?’

      ‘Yes,’ I whispered, sitting in the chair beside Simon Conway’s bed.

      ‘He can’t hear you, you know.’ Adam raised his voice above the norm. ‘There’s no need to whisper.’

      ‘Shh.’ I was irritated by his disrespect, his obvious need to prove that he wasn’t moved by what he saw. Well, I was moved and I wasn’t afraid to admit it; I felt raw with emotion. Each time I looked at Simon I relived the moment he shot himself. I heard the sound, the bang that left my ears ringing. I ran through the words I’d said leading up to him putting his gun down on the kitchen counter. It had been going well, his resolve had weakened, we had been engaging perfectly. But then my euphoria had taken over and I’d lost all sense of what I said next – if I’d said anything at all. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember.

      ‘So am I supposed to feel something right now?’ Adam interrupted my thoughts, loudly. ‘Is this a message, a psycho-babble way of telling me how lucky I am that I’m here and he’s there?’ he challenged me.

      I threw him a dagger look.

      ‘Who are you?’

      I jumped up from my chair at the sudden interruption by a woman walking into the room. She was mid to late thirties and held the hands of two little blonde girls, who looked up at her with large blue wondering eyes. Jessica and Kate; I remembered Simon telling me about them. Jessica was sad her pet rabbit had died and Kate kept pretending she would see him when Jessica wasn’t looking, to make her feel better. He had wondered if Kate would do the same thing about him when he was gone and I had told him he wouldn’t have to wonder, wouldn’t have to put them both through that if he stayed alive for them. The woman looked shattered. Simon’s wife, Susan. My heart began to palpitate, the guilt of my involvement wracking my body. I tried to remember what Angela had said, what everybody had said: it wasn’t my fault, I had only tried to help. It wasn’t my fault.

      ‘Hello.’ I struggled with how to introduce myself. It may have been seconds of silence but it felt as though it stretched on for ever. Susan’s face was not inviting, it was not warm and it was not reassuring. It did nothing to help my nervousness and worsened the sense of guilt I felt. I sensed Adam’s eyes on me, his saviour, now floundering in my lesson in self-belief and inner strength.

      I stepped forward and extended my hand, swallowed, heard the shake in my voice as I spoke. ‘My name is Christine Rose. I was with your husband the night he …’ I glanced at the two little girls looking up at me wide-eyed ‘… the night of the incident. I’d just like to say that—’

      ‘Get out,’ Susan said quietly.

      ‘I’m sorry?’ I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. This had been my worst nightmare. I had lived this scene a thousand times in various ways and through the eyes of many people in my late-night/early-morning fears, but I didn’t think it would actually come to fruition. I thought my fears were irrational; the only thing that had made them bearable was knowing they weren’t real.

      ‘You heard me,’ she repeated, pulling her daughters further into the room so that the doorway was clear for me to leave.

      I was frozen in place; this wasn’t happening. It took Adam placing a hand on my shoulder and giving me a gentle shove to finally make me come to my senses. We didn’t speak until we were both in the car and on the road. Adam opened his mouth to speak, but I got there first.

      ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ I struggled not to cry.

      ‘Okay,’ he said gently, then he looked like he was going to say more but he stopped himself and looked out the window.

      I wish I’d known what it was.

      I grew up in Clontarf, a coastal suburb of North Dublin. When I met Barry, I obligingly moved to Sandymount, his side of the city. We lived in his bachelor pad because he wanted to be close to his mother, who disliked me because I was Church of Ireland although I didn’t bother practising – I wasn’t sure which bothered her most. After six months of dating, Barry proposed, probably because that’s what all our peers were doing at the time, and I said yes because that’s what all our peers were saying, and it seemed like the mature and grown-up thing to do at our age, and six months later I was married and living in a new apartment we had bought together in Sandymount with the party behind me and reality now and for ever stretching ahead of me. My business remained in Clontarf, a short DART journey away each morning. Barry had been unable to sell his bachelor pad and instead rented it; the rent paid the mortgage. It would solve a lot of our current problems if Barry moved back into the pad he had made such a song and dance about leaving, thereby allowing me to stay in our home, but no, he was claiming our apartment. He was claiming our car too, so I was currently driving a friend’s car; Julie had emigrated to Toronto and still hadn’t managed to shift the car, which had been for sale for a year. In return for the favour of driving it, I was also responsible for taking care of its sale, advertising it with a FOR SALE sign on the front and rear windows with my phone number, and as a result fielding phone calls, enquiries and test drives. I was learning that people had a tendency to phone at random hours looking for the very same details as the car magazine advertisements already stated, as if they were expecting to hear a completely different answer.

      My office was on Clontarf Road, on the first floor of a three-storey house which had been the home of my dad’s three spinster aunts, Brenda, Adrienne and Christine, for whom me and my two sisters were named. Now the building was home to my dad and sisters’ firm, which was called Rose and Daughters Solicitors because my dad was a feminist. My dad had held his practice there for thirty years, ever since his remaining aunt decided to move into a self-contained flat in the basement instead of looking after the large house by herself. As soon as my sisters were qualified, they joined the firm. I had been dreading the day I’d have to tell him I didn’t want to work for the family firm, but he was more than understanding.