Free How to Fall in Love by Cecelia Ahern Page B

with his plan to demolish himself.
    ‘Okay!’ I clapped my hands as if I was about to start a clear-up of the area. ‘We’ve a lot to do if we’re going to make this happen. Your apartment is out of bounds now, I assume, so you can stay with me. I need to go home and change, I need to get to the office to pick up some things and I need to get to a shop – I’ll explain what for later. First, I have to get my car. Are you coming?’
    He looked at me in surprise, at my not leaving him in the way he thought I would, then he grabbed his coat and followed me.
    Once we were in the taxi my phone beeped.
    ‘That’s the third one in a row. You never check your messages. Not very encouraging for me for when I’m hanging off a bridge somewhere looking for a pep talk.’
    ‘They’re not messages, they’re voicemails.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    I knew because it was eight a.m. And there was only one thing that happened as soon as it hit eight a.m.
    ‘I just know.’
    He studied me. ‘You said no secrets, remember?’
    I thought about it and out of guilt for having read his ‘proposal’, which was currently in my pocket, handed him my phone.
    He dialled and listened to the messages. Ten minutes later he handed the phone back to me.
    I looked at 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.’
    ‘Shhh.’ 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