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Chapter 42

       Chapter 43

       Chapter 44

       Chapter 45

       Chapter 46

       Chapter 47

       Chapter 48

       Chapter 49

       Chapter 50

       Chapter 51

       Chapter 52

       Chapter 53

       Chapter 54

       Chapter 55

       Part Three

       Chapter 56

       Chapter 57

       Chapter 58

       Chapter 59

       Chapter 60

       Chapter 61

       Chapter 62

       Chapter 63

       Chapter 64

       Chapter 65

       Chapter 66

       Chapter 67

       Chapter 68

       Chapter 69

       Chapter 70

       Chapter 71

       Chapter 72

       Chapter 73

       Chapter 74

       Chapter 75

       Chapter 76

       Chapter 77

       Chapter 78

       Chapter 79

       Chapter 80

       Chapter 81

       Chapter 82

       Chapter 83

       Chapter 84

       Keep Reading …

       Books by Cecelia Ahern

       About the Publisher

      PERFECT: ideal, model, faultless, flawless, consummate, quintessential, exemplary, best, ultimate; (of a person) having all the required or desirable elements, qualities or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.

PART ONE

       Missing Image

      There’s the person you think you should be and there’s the person you really are. I’ve lost a sense of both.

       Missing Image

       A weed is just a flower growing in the wrong place.

      They’re not my words, they’re my granddad’s.

      He sees the beauty in everything, or perhaps it’s more that he thinks things that are unconventional and out of place are more beautiful than anything else. I see this trait in him every day: favouring the old farmhouse instead of the modernised gatehouse, brewing coffee in the ancient cast-iron pot over the open flames of the Aga instead of using the gleaming new espresso machine Mum bought him three birthdays ago that sits untouched, gathering dust, on the countertop. It’s not that he’s afraid of progress – in fact he is the first person to fight for change – but he likes authenticity, everything in its truest form. Including weeds: he admires their audacity, growing in places they haven’t been planted. It is this trait of his that has drawn me to him in my time of need and why he is putting his own safety on the line to harbour me.

      Harbour.

      That’s the word the Guild has used: Anybody who is aiding or harbouring Celestine North will face severe punishment. They don’t state the punishment, but the Guild’s reputation allows us to imagine. The danger of keeping me on his land doesn’t appear to scare Granddad; it makes him even more convinced of his duty to protect me.

      “A weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else,” he adds now, stooping low to pluck the intruder from the soil with his thick, strong hands.

      He has fighting hands, big and thick like shovels, but then in contradiction to that, they’re nurturing hands too. They’ve sown and grown, from his own land, and held and protected his own daughter and grandchildren. These hands that could choke

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