Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

8
Camilla
I never set out to help kill my son.
Even reading the words seems odd – like something you might see in a tabloid
newspaper, or one of those awful magazines that the cleaner always has poking
out of her handbag, full of women whose daughters ran off with their cheating
partners, tales of amazing weight loss and two-headed babies.
I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I thought I wasn’t.
My life was a fairly structured one – an ordinary one, by modern standards. I had
been married for almost thirty-seven years, I raised two children, I kept my
career, helped out at the school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children
didn’t need me any more.
I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years now. I watched the whole of
human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn’t get
themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the
repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden
mothers. It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same
faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the
impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of
humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many Grade II listed
buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from immune to it. Our
Regency squares held cider-drinking teenagers, our thatched cottages muffled
the sounds of husbands beating their wives and children. Sometimes I felt like