Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

it’s like a brain synapse – it can come back. I bet you if we hooked you up with a
really good regime, you could see a difference in your muscle memory. After all,
Lou tells me you were quite the action man before.’
‘Patrick,’ I said loudly. ‘You know nothing about it.’
‘I was just trying to –’
‘Well don’t. Really.’
The table fell silent. Dad coughed, and excused himself for it. Granddad
peered around the table in wary silence.
Mum made as if to offer everyone more bread, and then seemed to change her
mind.
When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone. ‘It’s
just research that I thought might be helpful. But I’ll say no more about it.’
Will looked up and smiled, his face blank, polite. ‘I’ll certainly bear it in
mind.’
I got up to clear the plates, wanting to escape the table. But Mum scolded me,
telling me to sit down.
‘You’re the birthday girl,’ she said – as if she ever let anyone else do anything,
anyway. ‘Bernard. Why don’t you go and get the chicken?’
‘Ha-ha. Let’s hope it’s stopped flapping around now, eh?’ Dad smiled, his
teeth bared in a kind of grimace.
The rest of the meal passed off without incident. My parents, I could see, were
completely charmed by Will. Patrick, less so. He and Will barely exchanged
another word. Somewhere around the point where Mum served up the roast
potatoes – Dad doing his usual thing of trying to steal extras – I stopped
worrying. Dad was asking Will all sorts, about his life before, even about the
accident, and he seemed comfortable enough to answer him directly. In fact, I
learnt a fair bit that he’d never told me. His job, for example, sounded pretty
important, even if he played it down. He bought and sold companies and made
sure he turned a profit while doing so. It took Dad a few attempts to prise out of
him that his idea of profit ran into six or seven figures. I found myself staring at
Will, trying to reconcile the man I knew with this ruthless City suit that he now
described. Dad told him about the company that was about to take over the
furniture factory, and when he said the name Will nodded almost apologetically,