This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon Read Free Book Online Page B

after her. She could not believe it. She didn’t even have to look behind her. She knew it was him and she felt a sudden anger rising inside her.
    “I don’t need this,” she hissed. “I do not need this.” And she started to walk even faster, pounding along towards the gap in the seawall.
    “Hey!”
    Over the music and the sound of the traffic she could just about hear him.
    As she stood at the edge of the footpath she could see him out of the corner of her eye. He was standing there beside the bench, a ridiculous figure in his beard and his daft-looking hat. He was holding one arm up in a kind of salute and he was shouting something at her.
    “Wait!”
    She pretended not to have seen him. She stood at the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic.
    A car stopped. The driver motioned for her to cross, and she ran for it. Lola ran along beside her without questioning why.
    She was aware now that he was following her. She heard a car horn beep and then she heard him shouting something at her, but she was so agitated she couldn’t hear what it was. He was just behind her now. There was no getting away from him.
    She stopped suddenly and turned round, trying to feign surprise. She removed her earphones one by one, holding them in her open right hand, the way you would hold a pair of dice you were about to roll.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said in her frostiest voice. “I didn’t hear you.”
    He had come to a stop in front of her. He was bent over double, leaning on the fronts of his thighs and panting, the flaps of his hat hanging down on either side of his face like dog ears. He didn’t speak, he just raised his right hand. He was dangling something between his thumb and his index finger.
    A very familiar-looking set of keys.
    She stared at them. Her mind was straining to catch up with what she was seeing. She looked down at her own hand where her keys should have been, and there was the poo bag.
    Suddenly it dawned on her what had happened. She looked at him in absolute horror.
    He looked so very unthreatening all of a sudden. Standing there, doubled up from the effort of chasing her, the brown eyes raised to hers. The keys held aloft, like an offering.
    She leaned back against the gatepost, threw her head back, and laughed.
    And that was how it started.
     
    AFTERWARDS, OF COURSE, he would joke about it.
    What I had to go through, he would say, to get this woman’s attention. I went through shit to get to her!
    And Addie would laugh. She would smile with good grace every time he told that story.
    “I kind of had to sleep with him,” she told her sister afterwards. “I behaved very badly. I felt I had to make it up to him.”

Chapter 6
    I t ’S NOT LIKE SHE slept with him right away. They actually spent the whole day together first.
    “It’s nice to meet you, Adeline Murphy, at long last!”
    He was studying her face with this rapturous expression. He seemed genuinely delighted, his eyes shining.
    They were sitting opposite each other at the battered old table in the basement, two mugs of coffee set in front of them. The coffee was still too hot to drink.
    Addie was in an agony of embarrassment. Even now she was trying to find the space in her head to go back over the excuses she’d made. She wasn’t convinced she’d carried them off.
    “We only just checked the messages last night,” she had said. “We were going to ring you back today.” The dark red flush creeping up over her face gave away the lie. All her life, Addie had been a blusher. It was a constant source of mortification to her.
    “I can’t believe you’re the cousin!” she had said in a desperate attempt to redeem herself. “It never even occurred to me. I thought you were some stranger who was following me.”
    The whole time she was making her excuses he was nodding politely. He was doing that thing of smiling at her with his eyes. He seemed amused by it all.
    He was more handsome than you would have thought at first