Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

as well as a new bedside light and some shelves, which I assembled myself. It’s
not that I’m good at that stuff; I guess I just wanted to see if I could do it.
I set about redecorating, painting for an hour a night after I came home from
work, and at the end of the week even Dad had to admit I’d done a really good
job. He stared for a bit at my cutting in, fingered the blinds that I had put up
myself, and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘This job has been the making of you,
Lou.’
I bought a new duvet cover, a rug and some oversized cushions – just in case
anyone ever stopped by, and fancied lounging. Not that anyone did. The calendar
went on the back of the new door. Nobody saw it except for me. Nobody else
would have known what it meant, anyway.
I did feel a bit bad about the fact that once we had put Thomas’s camp bed up
next to Treena’s in the box room, there wasn’t actually any floor space left, but
then I rationalized – they didn’t even really live here any more. And the box
room was somewhere they were only going to sleep. There was no point in the
larger room being empty for weeks on end.
I went to work each day, thinking about other places I could take Will. I didn’t
have any overall plan, I just focused each day on getting him out and about and
trying to keep him happy. There were some days – days when his limbs burnt, or
when infection claimed him and he lay miserable and feverish in bed – that were
harder than others. But on the good days I had managed several times to get him
out into the spring sunshine. I knew now that one of the things Will hated most
was the pity of strangers, so I drove him to local beauty spots, where for an hour
or so it could be just the two of us. I made picnics and we sat out on the edges of
fields, just enjoying the breeze and being away from the annexe.
‘My boyfriend wants to meet you,’ I told him one afternoon, breaking off
pieces of cheese and pickle sandwich for him.
I had driven several miles out of town, up on to a hill, and we could see the
castle, across the valley opposite, separated from us by fields of lambs.
‘Why?’
‘He wants to know who I’m spending all these late nights with.’
Oddly, I could see he found this quite cheering.
‘Running Man.’
‘I think my parents do too.’