The Year I Met You
The year that changed my life. For Jasmine, losing her job felt like losing everything.The year I found home. With a life built around her career and her beloved sister Heather, suddenly her world becomes the house and garden she has hardly seen and the neighbours she has yet to meet.The year I met you. But being fired is just the beginning for Jasmine. In the year that unfolds she learns more about herself than she could ever imagine – and more about other people than she ever dreamed. Sometimes friendship is found in the most unexpected of places.
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2014
Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007501793
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007501786
Version: 2017-08-14
For my friend Lucy Stack.
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly …
Our greatest glory is not in never falling,
but in rising every time we fall.
Confucius
Table of Contents
The season between autumn and spring, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere the coldest months of the year: December, January and February.
A period of inactivity or decay.
I was five years old when I learned that I was going to die.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I would not live for ever; why would it? The topic of my death hadn’t been mentioned in passing.
My knowledge of death was not tenuous; goldfish died, I’d learned that first-hand. They died if you didn’t feed them, and then they also died if you fed them too much. Dogs died when they ran in front of moving cars, mice died when they were tempted by chocolate HobNobs in the mousetrap in our cloakroom under the stairs, rabbits died when they escaped their hutches and fell prey to evil foxes. Discovering their deaths was not cause for any personal alarm; even as a five-year-old I knew that these were all furry animals who did foolish things, things that I had no intention of doing.
So it was a great disturbance to learn that death would find me too.
According to my source, if I was ‘lucky’ my death would occur in the very same way as my grandfather’s had. Old. Smelling of pipe smoke and farts, with balls of tissue stuck to the stubble over his top lip from blowing his nose. Black lines of dirt beneath the tips of his fingernails from gardening; eyes yellowing at the corners, reminding me of the marble from my uncle’s collection that my sister used to suck on and swallow, causing Dad to come running to wrap his arms around her stomach and squeeze till the marble popped back out again. Old. With brown trousers hiked up past his waist, stopping only for his flabby boob-like chest, revealing a soft paunch and balls that had been squished to one side of the seam of his trousers. Old. No, I did not want to die how my granddad had, but dying old, my source revealed, was the best-case scenario.
I learned of my impending death from my older cousin Kevin on the day of my granddad’s funeral as we sat on the grass at the end of his long garden with plastic cups of red lemonade in our hands and as far away as possible from our mourning parents, who looked like dung beetles on what was the hottest day of the year. The grass was covered in dandelions and daisies and was much longer than usual, Granddad’s illness having prevented him from perfecting the garden in his final weeks. I remember feeling sad for him, defensive, that of all the days to showcase his beautiful back garden to neighbours and friends, it was on a day when it wasn’t the perfection he aspired to. He wouldn’t have minded not being there – he didn’t like to talk much – but he would have at least cared about the grand presentation, and then vanished to listen to the praise somewhere, away from everyone, maybe upstairs with the window open. He would pretend he didn’t care, but he would, a contented smile on his face, to go with his grass-stained knees and black fingernails. Someone, an old lady with rosary beads tied tightly around her knuckles, said she felt his presence in the garden, but I didn’t. I was sure he wasn’t there. He would be so annoyed by the look of the place, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.
