Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How
could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days
until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning
under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How
could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin
would be decaying under the ground?
I couldn’t tell anyone. That was almost the worst bit. I was now complicit in
the Traynors’ secret. Sick and listless, I rang Patrick to say I wasn’t feeling well
and was going to stay home. No problem, he was doing a 10k, he said. He
probably wouldn’t be through at the athletics club until after nine anyway. I’d
see him on Saturday. He sounded distracted, as if his mind were already
elsewhere, further along some mythical track.
I refused supper. I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the
point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back
downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of
Granddad, who was the only person in our family guaranteed not to ask me a
question. He sat in his favourite armchair and stared at the screen with glassyeyed
intensity. I was never sure whether he was watching, or whether his mind
was somewhere else entirely.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you something, love?’ Mum appeared at my side
with a cup of tea. There was nothing in our family that couldn’t be improved by
a cup of tea, allegedly.
‘No. Not hungry, thanks.’
I saw the way she glanced at Dad. I knew that later on there would be private
mutterings that the Traynors were working me too hard, that the strain of looking
after such an invalid was proving too much. I knew they would blame
themselves for encouraging me to take the job.
I would have to let them think they were right.
Paradoxically, the following day Will was on good form – unusually talkative,
opinionated, belligerent. He talked, possibly more than he had talked on any
previous day. It was as if he wanted to spar with me, and was disappointed when
I wouldn’t play.
‘So when are you going to finish this hatchet job, then?’