The One Awakened: Book 1 in The One Trilogy by Alexandra North Read Free Book Online

informed me that he was going . It turned out he wasn’t going to see his mate Mark, who lived a few streets away as I’d first thought, but in actual fact, was leaving me, and our two year old son, for pastures new, or ‘vadge’s new’ as Abby crudely coined it. All, just as I was about to serve up a roast chicken dinner with gorgeous fluffy homemade bloody Yorkshire puddings!
    At the time, that was what had annoyed me the most; the fact that I’d made my own batter from scratch; for him! Not a frigging frozen Aunt Bessie pudding in sight. Isn’t it strange the things that go through your mind when your world, as you know it, suddenly stops and does a complete hundred and eighty degree rotation, leaving everything altered. Tilted. Shattered.I had spent the next twenty-four hours in shock. After talking as rationally as I could manage, Niall agreed to visit the GP to see if it was depression, as I couldn’t understand why he had suddenly decided that our partnership was over, even though looking back on it there were definite and huge holes in our relationship. Returning, he’d stated in no uncertain terms, “It is not depression, it is you . You’re the problem.”  
    Not the best thing to hear from your partner but little did I know that he was actually doing me a favour with those eleven life-changing words. They made me strong during an impossibly turbulent time and whilst he returned to work that day, I quickly withdrew into my protective armour, and packed his things into a case, one of the hideous old ‘hearing aid beige’ Antler numbers we’d inherited from my parents – I wasn’t going to send the selfish prick off looking stylish! I’d spent the best part of ten years trying to turn him into a fashion icon and now that he looked passable, it was going to go to use on some other woman - pah!The crime to luggage fashion was sitting heavily pregnant with its stuffing, at the foot of the stairs, awaiting his return that night, along with a pile of man’s crap I’d been itching to throw out for years and had never dared. A post it note completed the rather blunt ‘ Fuck Off !’

    For a while, I was still under the impression he was struggling with life in general and that it was all just getting on top of him. So I’d tried to be supportive and do the right thing , whatever that was, for Finn’s sake more than mine.The reality came at me, months later, like a car crash. No. Sorry - that’s belittling it somewhat. It could be more likened to a motorway pile up - complete with decapitation.  
    He was a lying, cheating, fucking asshole!  
    He’d had his faults but I’d never though he was a cheat. Apparently, he’d been having it away with some account manager at work for six months and she was more carefree than me and didn’t have kids, so it was a win-win!With hindsight - the glorious, unobtainable object that it is when you need it, I would have reviewed our situation differently - well before Niall had flipped out. Whilst we had been happy at definitive times throughout our on/off ten-year relationship, there had always been something missing; something lacking that was difficult to pinpoint. If I’m honest, I had always wondered if we’d ever make it to five-years, let alone ten. But coming from a family, where my parents had been happily married for thirty-five years, I felt that I owed it to Finn to make do and hoped that one day, the much-coveted link would be served up to me on a platter. The reality was that the aforesaid missing link had been there all along, under my nose, in the form of Niall Wilson - cruel but so true.
    Niall, as a fellow college student, had seemed pretty cool at the time; he was fun, unique, sensitive and arty and I suppose this made him appear moody and unobtainable. These attributes had appealed to me at 19, but had I just listened to my inner voice and ignored the romantic in me that thought I could fix him , I would have realised that he was in fact