Three Amazing Things About You Read Online Free Page B

an easy relationship studded with humour. Twice a day, when her shifts at the retirement home allowed, Flo called in to check up on her, bring the shopping she’d asked for, carry out any odd jobs that needed doing, pick up prescriptions from the chemist and hoover up after the incredible moulting Jeremy.
    Jeremy was the great love of Elsa’s life and the reason she’d flatly refused to consider moving into a retirement home herself.
    ‘But there are plenty of places that allow pets,’ Flo had protested, the first time the subject had been raised.
    ‘Maybe so,’ Elsa sniffed. ‘But Jeremy wouldn’t like it.’
    They were two of a kind, a match made in heaven, both of them prickly and aloof. Jeremy didn’t care to mingle with other cats, and Elsa found other old people profoundly tedious. They were quite happy as they were, thank you very much.
    Luckily Flo had liked Jeremy, finding his air of world-weary disdain amusing, and Jeremy had in turn just about tolerated her. Until a year into her time there, when Jeremy went out one evening and didn’t reappear for his dinner. He was such a creature of habit that it was obvious something had happened. After seven hours of searching throughout a windy, rain-swept night, Flo found him mewing weakly beneath a hedge on Sion Hill.
    Hit by a car and left for dead, Jeremy had sustained multiple fractures and severe internal injuries. Another hour or two, they were told, and it would have been too late. The vet warned them that he still might not pull through, but Elsa, utterly distraught, insisted on everything possible being done to save him. Money was no object. Jeremy couldn’t –
mustn’t
– be allowed to die.
    He’d survived, obviously. It had taken time, a lot of care and more money than some people earned in a year. But slowly, he recovered. And Elsa had taken note of the love and devotion Flo had lavished on her most beloved pet.
    ‘I have a proposition for you.’ She had broached the subject with typical bluntness. ‘If I die before Jeremy, will you look after him?’
    ‘Of course I will.’ Touched that she’d been deemed worthy of such an honour, Flo said, ‘I’ll have to check with my landlord. I know we aren’t allowed to have dogs, but I’m sure he’d be fine about—’
    ‘Good grief, are you mad?’ Elsa recoiled in horror. ‘Jeremy wouldn’t want to live in some ghastly damp basement flat. I meant you’d move in here with him.’
    ‘Here? Oh! For how long?’
    ‘For as long as he’s still alive, of course. This is his home. He’s happy here.’
    ‘Right. So I’d be Jeremy’s . . . lodger.’
    ‘Exactly. This place has to be nicer than where you are now. And you’d be living here rent-free. How does that sound?’
    Well, she was certainly right about the huge Georgian flat in Caledonia Place being a cut above her damp basement bedsit in Barrow Street.
    ‘And Jeremy’s only nine years old,’ Elsa pointed out. ‘If I drop dead tomorrow, you could be here for the next ten years. I call that a good deal.’
    Flo considered the offer. It actually was pretty good.
    ‘I’m only offering because I know you’d take good care of him,’ Elsa went on. ‘You might not love him as much as I do, but you’d be the next best thing once I’m gone.’
    ‘OK, fine, I’ll do it.’ Flo nodded and smiled. Think of the money she’d save in rent.
    ‘After Jeremy dies, the flat will go to my grandchildren. You’d have to move out then, obviously.’
    ‘Obviously.’ Amused, Flo envisaged herself staying on, refusing to leave, shackling herself to a radiator.
    ‘Good girl. That’s settled, then.’ Satisfied with this, Elsa said, ‘I’ll call Mary and arrange for her to put it in the will.’
    Which she had.
    Flo tuned back in to the current drama; Lena was on the phone now to some hapless legal expert who basically wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. Infuriated all over again, she snapped, ‘Oh Marcus, you’re such a pompous