How We Met Read Online Free PDF Page A

behalf, but they wouldn’t listen. Of c ourse they wouldn’t listen, they were steaming and Mia had gone home feeling utterly deflated, sure that two broken fingers and a police caution was definitely
not
how her best friend would want her birthday to be marked.
    Also, perhaps due to being pregnant, she felt blocked. She couldn’t let her grief run riot like the rest of them. Everything was too much – life event overload – and even though everyone else had piled back to Melody and Norm’s, she’d gone home to Eduardo (who was still with her at this point, preferring to wait until she was thirty-six weeks pregnant to tell her, actually, this whole baby thing wasn’t really going to work for him …) and lay in bed, staring into the dark.
    But tonight was a whole year later, wasn’t it? Their grief was less raw; it would be more of a celebration, a celebration of her life! A chance to reminisce about the good times – so many good times – and a chance to get together. Then she located Melody and Norm at the end of the final tunnel, clearly already in the throes of a row, and her heart sank.
    Melody turned dramatically when she saw Mia, who thought, if she were turning into a character from
Coronation Street
, then her good friend Melody Burgess was fast becoming one from
Ally McBeal
. All power dressing and courtroom drama.
    ‘Nobody’s here yet,’ she said, breathily, with what Mia couldn’t help but feel was a slightly staged flick of her hair. ‘Twenty past eight and not a peep out of anyone.’
    ‘Well, I’m here,’ said Mia, brightly.
    ‘Right, yes, I suppose so and er … Billy,’ said Melody, somewhat begrudgingly, clocking the buggy, as if Mia had a choice in this matter. Mia gritted her teeth.
    Norm groaned. ‘I’ve told her to take a chill-pill,’ he said. ‘I’ve told her this is about Olivia, REMEMBER?’ He fired daggers at Melody, and Mia found herself thinking – not for the first time in the last year: what happened to my friends? Jolly old Norm and Melody? Inseparable. Bonded for years in their love of cider and singing appalling indie anthems on karaoke?
    Melody folded her arms indignantly. ‘Well, I’m disgusted, frankly. I mean, Anna’s no surprise but
Fraser
? Liv was
his
girlfriend, remember?’
    ‘I think we do,’ said Mia, in a way that was supposed to be helpful and calm her down but didn’t.
    ‘So why the fuck isn’t he here then? No phone call, no text,
nada
!’
    ‘Um, do you mind putting your foot down, mate?’ Fraser was sitting in the back of a black cab travelling from Preston to Lancaster, jiggling his legs up and down, which he always did when he was nervous. Honestly, what was wrong with these provincial types? No sense of urgency. Liv was doing this, he thought. She knew all about his overactive conscience and she was having a laugh. He imagined her looking down at him now, sweating and toxic and wracked with guilt, and thinking, you muppet, Fraser Morgan. All this guilt for a fumble with a barmaid? Deep down of course, so deep down he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, Fraser Morgan knew this tardiness and stress was entirely of his own making. In fact, the last twenty-four hours were entirely of his own making.
    He was supposed to have caught the four o’clock from Euston – which would have got him to Lancaster and the Merchants in plenty of time, but because he was far too nice and far too hungover to put up a fight, he’d somehow become embroiled in a Tarot reading from Karen, which overran (he wasn’t sure how long the average Tarot reading was, but felt sure an hour and a half was overrunning), missed the four o clock, so had to catch the five o’clock, and only realized when he was on the train that it didn’t go further than Preston.
    He now felt wretched, having thrown up in the train toilets and fielded three texts from Karen – are you on the train yet? How’s the hangover? He’d finally broken when she’d told him what she