Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some
part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.
‘I’m fine. I just … ’
I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.
‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think
about … ’ He swallowed.
Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.
‘I just … want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress.
Just for a few minutes more.’
I released the door handle.
‘Sure.’
I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there
together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in
the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.
My sister and I never really talked about what happened that night at the maze.
I’m not entirely sure we had the words. She held me for a bit, then spent some
time helping me find my clothes, and then searched in vain in the long grass for
my shoes until I told her that it really didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have worn them
again, anyway. And then we walked home slowly – me in my bare feet, her with
her arm linked through mine, even though we hadn’t walked like that since she
was in her first year at school and Mum had insisted I never let her go.
When we got home, we stood on the porch and she wiped at my hair and then
at my eyes with a damp tissue, and then we unlocked the front door and walked
in as if nothing had happened.
Dad was still up, watching some football match. ‘You girls are a bit late,’ he
called out. ‘I know it’s a Friday, but still … ’
‘Okay, Dad,’ we called out, in unison.
Back then, I had the room that is now Granddad’s. I walked swiftly upstairs
and, before my sister could say a word, I closed the door behind me.
I chopped all my hair off the following week. I cancelled my plane ticket. I
didn’t go out with the girls from my old school again. Mum was too sunk in her
own grief to notice, and Dad put any change in mood in our house, and my new
habit of locking myself in my bedroom, down to ‘women’s problems’. I had