The Year I Met You by Cecelia Ahern Read Free Book Online

manner, but I feel that when I tell myself what it is I’m looking for, then I fully know what it is that I must find. Order given: dutiful body and mind respond.
    Sometimes the very thing I am looking for is staring me straight in the face, but I can’t see it. This happens to me a lot. It happened this morning when I was looking for my coat in my wardrobe. It was right in front of me, but because I didn’t say, ‘Black coat with the leather sleeves,’ it didn’t appear to me. I was just idly searching, eyes running over clothes and not finding anything.
    I think – in fact, I have come to know – that I have applied this thinking on a larger scale, I’ve applied it to my life. I tell myself what I want, what I am looking for, I envision it so that it’s easier to find, and then I find it. It has worked for me all my life.
    So now I find myself in a place where all that I’ve envisioned and worked hard for has been taken away, it is not mine any more. First thing I do is try to get it all back again, make it mine again, straight away, immediately; and if that’s not possible – which it usually isn’t, because I’m a realist, not a voodoo practitioner – then I must find something else to look for, something else to achieve. I’m obviously talking about my job here. I know I will get back to work eventually, but I have been put on hold. I have been stalled, and there is nothing I can do about it.
    I’m on what is called ‘gardening leave’. It has nothing to do with gardening, thankfully, or I’d have a very long year power-hosing and weeding between the cracks of my cobble-locked garden. Gardening leave is the practice whereby an employee who has left their job or who has been terminated is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. It’s often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date and perhaps sensitive information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor. I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor, as I’ve already explained, however Larry felt certain that I would work with a company we were in relative competition with, a company I had tried to schmooze to buy ours. He was right. I would have worked with them. They called me the day after I was fired to offer me a job. When I told them about the gardening leave they said they couldn’t possibly wait that long – twelve months gardening leave!! – and so they went off to find somebody else. Not only has the length of my gardening leave chased away other employers, I have absolutely nothing to do while I wait. It feels like a prison sentence. Twelve months gardening leave. It is a sentence. I feel as if I’m gathering dust on some shelf while the world is moving on around me and I can’t do anything to stop it or join in. I don’t want my mind to start growing moss; I’ll need to continuously power-hose it, to keep it fresh.
    Blades of wet grass stick to my feet, working their way up my ankles as I walk back and forth on the patch of grass. So what happens when I’m put on hold for an entire year and there’s nothing I can do about it? What do I do?
    I pad up and down on the wet grass, my feet starting to feel cold but my mind buzzing with a new idea. A new project. A goal. An objective. Something to do. I must right a wrong. I will uproot the very ground I walk on, which will be easy because I feel as if I have been uprooted already.
    I will give the neighbourhood a gift. I will bring back the garden.

5
    ‘He’s beautiful,’ I whisper, looking at the tiny baby in my friend Bianca’s arms.
    ‘I know,’ she smiles, gazing at him adoringly.
    ‘Is it amazing?’ I ask.
    ‘Yeah, it’s … amazing.’ She looks away, her smile a bit wobbly, her eyes sunken into the back of her head from two nights’ lack of sleep. ‘Hey, have you started a new job yet?’
    ‘No, I can’t – you know, the gardening leave