Cecelia Ahern 3-Book Collection: One Hundred Names, How to Fall in Love, The Year I Met You. Cecelia Ahern

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      She paid and couldn’t think of anything further to say. She took the chips and left the vinegar-covered card on the counter. At least she had dinner. When she rounded the corner her bike was gone, and so were the kids.

      Kitty stood at the base of the steps that led to her flat and looked up into the darkness, dreading to think what might be waiting for her that evening.

      ‘Kitty? Kitty Logan, is that you?’

      She whirled around, trying to find the source of the voice. A man inside the dry-cleaners was squinting at her, head cocked to one side and then to the other as he tried to figure her out. She took him in: the smart suit, the respectable haircut, the polished shoes, the long face, the strong jaw. The small circular glasses were a new addition, though.

      ‘Richie?’ she asked. ‘Richie Daly?’

      He looked relieved and she knew she was right. She went into the dry-cleaners to meet him, usually a no-no for her as the owner was only ever a moment away from throwing her on the ironing board and steaming her to death.

      ‘I knew that was you!’ he laughed, holding his arms open for Kitty to fall into. She hugged him warmly and then stepped back to study him.

      ‘My God, you look like you but you’re completely different,’ she said, unable to believe her eyes.

      ‘For the better, I hope,’ he said with a grin. ‘The ripped cords and Converse weren’t a good look.’

      ‘And your hair! It’s all gone!’

      ‘I could say the same about you,’ he replied, and her hand immediately went to her bobbed hair, which had always been halfway down her back in college.

      ‘Listen to us – you’d swear we hadn’t met in fifty years,’ she laughed.

      ‘Well, twelve years is a long time.’

      ‘Is it twelve? Scary. So what are you doing here?’

      He signalled his surroundings, ‘Uh … dry-cleaning.’

      ‘Of course.’ She rolled her eyes.

      Her landlord cleared his throat, interrupting their conversation, and looked at them like he wanted to kill them both.

      ‘I live just upstairs, would you like to … I mean, do you want a coffee or something?’ Half-way through her sentence she realised there could be a possible wife and two point four kids waiting in a car outside the dry-cleaners, wondering why Daddy was hugging a strange woman. She looked outside self-consciously.

      ‘A coffee?’ Richie asked, appalled. ‘Forget it, let’s get a proper drink.’

      They went to Smyths pub on Fairview Strand, it was seven o’clock and busy on a Friday. They managed to find a table with two stools, and they shared the chips and caught up on old times.

      ‘So what are you doing?’ Kitty asked after filling him in on her work history since college, leaving out the disastrous Colin Maguire débâcle, of course, and though she was guessing he already knew, as she felt the entire world knew, he was polite enough not to bring it up.

      ‘Me?’ He looked down at his pint. It was his fourth already and Kitty, after her fourth glass of wine, was already feeling woozy. ‘I’m currently writing a book.’

      ‘A book? Wow, Richie, that’s fantastic.’

      ‘It’s funny to hear you call me Richie, you know. They all call me Richard now.’

      ‘Well, of course, any decent self-respecting author wouldn’t settle for anything less. What’s the book about?’

      ‘It’s a novel.’

      ‘That’s exciting.’

      ‘And that’s it,’ he said coyly.

      ‘Ah, come on, you have to tell me more. Is it romance? Historical? Mills & Boon?’

      He laughed. ‘Mills & Boon, definitely Mills & Boon.’

      She was suddenly aware of their closeness, how they’d gone from innocent catching-up to flirting, and more importantly, of how much more handsome he seemed now.

      ‘It’s a crime novel,’ he explained, their heads closer now, their knees touching. ‘I’m about a quarter of the way through. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but never did. With work and everything it’s hard to find the time to do things for yourself. So I just thought one day, fuck it, Richie, do it. And I did. Or at least I’m trying.’

      ‘Good for you. It takes a lot for people to follow their dreams. You could be the next Susan Boyle,’ she teased.

      ‘What about you? Is Thirty Minutes the dream?’

      She looked down at her glass and was surprised to see it was empty again; hadn’t she just started it? Richie signalled for another. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her head spinning nicely and her tongue feeling oversized. ‘I don’t know what the dream is any more.’

      ‘You don’t like working in TV?’

      ‘I …’ she hesitated, feeling that at any moment she could explode about all that she felt for the show and its process, but she was guarded. She hadn’t spoken to anybody about it, but Richie genuinely didn’t seem to know. His eyes were soft and welcoming, non-judgemental, and a little bloodshot, and she felt like she was twenty again, back in the college bar, missing lectures at a time when nothing, at least to her now, felt serious. She trusted him. ‘I don’t work for Thirty Minutes any more,’ she finally admitted.

      ‘No?’ He drained his glass. ‘What happened?’

      ‘You really don’t know or are you just trying to be nice?’

      ‘How would I know? Is it something I should know? Kitty, I’m sorry, I’ve had my head in my book for the past few months. I’ve no idea what’s going on. Somebody just told me today that those Chilean miners were all rescued.’

      Kitty laughed. ‘That was two years ago.’

      ‘Well, there you go,’ he smiled. ‘I’m a slow writer. Seriously, you don’t have to tell if you don’t want to. We’re just here for a nice time.’ He smiled supportively.

      ‘I fucked up a story. I fucked up a story really badly and it ended up going to court, the network lost a load of money, and they suspended me, which is code for never hiring me ever again. Now the magazine that I work for are thinking of doing the same thing because they’re under pressure from advertisers who feel they have a responsibility even though it’s been rumoured they’ve been using child labourers on boats to make their crap products, but in the meantime I’m still working on a story for them even though they can’t publish it and it’s the only thing I truly care about now, but I have a week to my deadline and I still don’t know what the story is and while I’m trying to do that I return to my apartment every evening to find dog shit, paint, toilet roll and whatever vile thing Colin Maguire’s four hundred and fifty thousand euro and his little posse can throw at me.’

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