Free Things We Never Say by Sheila O'Flanagan

one thing in life that she knew she was really good at. And it was important that her husband was able to allow her to keep doing it.

Chapter 7
    After his daughter-in-law had left (he’d been grateful for the shopping and for the bit of company, but he was still glad when she’d gone), Fred went into the living room, with its panoramic views of the sea. But he wasn’t interested in the views today. He opened the web browser on his computer and clicked on his search history. He wanted to go back to some of the pages he’d been looking at earlier.
    Fred was comfortable with computers. He’d always been at the forefront of new technology, which was why he’d done so well in the car alarm and security business. He thought machines were a lot easier to understand than people, and far more predictable.
    He loved being able to find things out at the click of a button, but it annoyed him how easily he was distracted from the pages he’d set out to look at. Clicking links dragged him off into areas where he didn’t need to be but which intrigued him all the same. He understood why it was called surfing – that was exactly what he felt happened to him every time he was pulled from page to page in an undertow of irrelevant information – but it irritated him all the same.
    He opened the last item he’d been looking at and then realised that it was the image of an old newspaper and not the page he wanted. He’d originally searched for it out of curiosity, but events from the year he was born didn’t interest him very much. Fifty-five years ago, though, that was a different story. Fifty-five years ago mattered a good deal to Fred. Despite the proliferation of information on the internet, however, none of it was relevant to what he wanted to find out. The truth was, Fred thought to himself as he clicked on another futile link, he needed a professional to do the work for him. In his younger days he might have been able to track down the people he wanted to track down, but as it was … He grunted in disgust and rubbed his injured wrist. He hated being eighty-one. He hated that he couldn’t depend on his once virile body to behave as he wanted it to behave. In his youth he’d jeered at doddery old gits who took half an hour to cross the road. These days he was a doddery old git himself and he only crossed the road at pedestrian lights. Old externally, of course. Internally he was the same person he’d always been.
    Although that wasn’t strictly true. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the keyboard. He was a very different Fred Fitzpatrick from the twenty-five-year-old Fred. Or the forty-five-year-old Fred. Or even the sixty-five-year-old Fred. The last few years were the ones that had changed him. And now he was a softer and less driven Fred. Maybe even a regretful Fred.
    He hated having regrets, that was the thing. He never used to regret anything. He didn’t regret for a second all the time and energy he’d poured into his business over the years, even though he knew of lots of people who said that they wished they’d spent more time with their families. He thought he’d spent exactly the right amount of time with his. He didn’t regret spending the money he’d made on buying a statement house in one of Dublin’s most affluent areas. He didn’t care that he was rattling around in it on his own, or that most of his neighbours were – in his eyes – pretentious tossers. (He didn’t regret not getting to know them either. Assholes, the lot of them.) He didn’t regret his marriage to Ros, or even the affairs that had peppered it. These things happened. There was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t regret how he’d brought up his children, because in the end, they’d learned to stand on their own two feet. He’d had a reason for everything he’d done, at home, at work, socially. He’d lived a full life, a happy life, and if there was one thing he’d learned during it, it was that there was no