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

her she has tears streaming down her face.
    The door opens and her pale husband Tristan ducks his head in. He sees his firstborn and his face softens, then he looks up and sees his wife and his face tightens. He swallows.
    ‘Hi, Jasmine,’ he steps inside and greets me.
    ‘Congratulations, Daddy,’ I say gently. ‘He’s beautiful.’
    ‘He’s got a mouthful of fangs, is what he has,’ Bianca says, wincing again.
    The baby screams as he’s pulled away from her chapped red raw nipple.
    ‘Seriously, Tristan, this is … I can’t …’ Her face crumples.
    I leave them to it.
    I tell myself while driving that I am not interested in watching your son on YouTube. I tell myself I won’t stoop to your level, that I have far more important things to do than think about you and absorb myself in your world, but all I actually have to do that day is shop for dinner. Shopping for one person doesn’t depress me as it does some of my other single friends; I am happy to be alone and everybody needs to eat, but it has come to this. Eating. Eating was something I had to squeeze into my busy day because I had to, to stay alive. Now it is something to string out, make an afternoon of. The last few days I have made elaborate meals for myself. Yesterday I spent fifty-five minutes in Eason’s browsing the shelves for recipe books, spent sixty minutes buying the ingredients, which took me two and a half hours to prepare and cook, and then I ate it in twenty minutes. That was my entire day yesterday. It was enjoyable but the novelty has worn off many of the things I was looking forward to doing in my ‘time off’.
    When I pull into the supermarket car park, the day surprisingly bright and sunny for the first time in weeks though it is still cold, I take my phone out of my bag and go straight to YouTube. I type in Matt Marshall and immediately ‘Matt Marshall’s son’ pops up as an option. I select it. Posted late last night, it already has thirty thousand views – which is impressive.
    Though I have never seen your son close up, the image of him is immediately familiar to me. It is what I see most days as he leaves for school, head hidden under a hood, his face downward, earphones on his head, red hair peeking out from under his hood as he walks from the house to the bus stop. I have been his neighbour for four years and it occurs to me I don’t even know his name, but the comments beneath the video tell me that it is Fionn.
    Way to go, Fionn!
    My dad is a loser 2, know how u feel!
    Your dad shud be locked up 4 da shit dat he says.
    I am a registered psychologist and I am concerned by your outburst, please contact me, I can help.
    I’m a big fan of your dad, he helped my son when he was being bullied in school, he helped shed light on bullying laws in Ireland.
    May the angels heal your inner anger.
    Your dad’s a loser and you’re a fag.
    A small slice of the supportive comments the viewing public have made.
    Fionn is fifteen years old and from his uniform each morning I can tell he attends Belvedere, a costly private school in Dublin. Though I haven’t watched it yet, I already know that they will not like this. Here on the screen I can see he has brown eyes, his cheeks and nose are lightly freckled. He is looking down at the webcam, his laptop at an angle to take him all in so that the lights on the ceiling are blaring in the camera. His nostrils are wide and flaring with anger. There is music in the background, I guess he is at a party, I’m guessing he is drunk. His pupils are dilated, though perhaps the anger is causing that. What ensues is a four-minute rant about how he would officially like to separate himself from his loser dad, you, who he believes is not a real dad. He says that you are an embarrassment, a waster, his mum is the only person who keeps things going, you have no talent. And on it goes, a well-spoken boy, attempting to be harder than he is in a badly constructed attack on you, outlining why he