Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘I think so.’
‘It has been very –’ her gaze flickered towards me ‘– rewarding, to see him a
little more like his old self. I am very well aware that all these improvements are
due to you.’
‘Not all of them.’
‘I couldn’t reach him. I couldn’t get anywhere near him.’ She placed her cup
and saucer on her knee. ‘He’s a singular person, Will. From the time he hit
adolescence, I always had to fight the feeling that in his eyes I had somehow
done something wrong. I’ve never been quite sure what it was.’ She tried to
laugh, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all, glancing briefly at me and then looking
away.
I pretended to sip my coffee, even though there was nothing in my cup.
‘Do you get on well with your mother, Louisa?’
‘Yes,’ I said, then added, ‘it’s my sister who drives me nuts.’
Mrs Traynor gazed out of the windows, to where her precious garden had
begun to bloom, its blossoms a pale and tasteful melding of pinks, mauves and
blues.
‘We have just two and a half months.’ She spoke without turning her head.
I put my coffee cup on the table. I did it carefully, so that it didn’t clatter. ‘I’m
doing my best, Mrs Traynor.’
‘I know, Louisa.’ She nodded.
I let myself out.
Leo McInerney died on 22 May, in the anonymous room of a flat in Switzerland,
wearing his favourite football shirt, with both his parents at his side. His younger
brother refused to come, but issued a statement saying that no one could have
been more loved, or more supported than his brother. Leo drank the milky
solution of lethal barbiturate at 3.47pm and his parents said that within minutes
he was in what appeared to be a deep sleep. He was pronounced dead at a little
after four o’clock that afternoon by an observer who had witnessed the whole
thing, alongside a video camera there to forestall any suggestion of wrongdoing.
‘He looked at peace,’ his mother was quoted as saying. ‘It’s the only thing I
can hold on to.’