Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘Come on. It’s finally stopped raining. I just spoke to my dad. He said he’ll
give us the keys to the castle after five o’clock, once all the tourists are out.’
I didn’t feel great about the idea of us having to make polite conversation
during a walk around the grounds. But the thought of being out of the annexe
was appealing.
‘Okay. Give me five minutes. I need to try and get the smell of vinegar off my
hands.’
The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that he
wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up as he had done, with
wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants
as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall
into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.
Will had escaped into the empty grounds of the castle his whole childhood, he
said. His dad let him roam the place, trusting him not to touch anything. After
5.30pm, when the last of the tourists had gone, as the gardeners began to trim
and tidy, as the cleaners emptied the bins and swept up the empty cartons of
drink and commemorative toffee fudge, it had become his private playground.
As he told me this, I mused that if Treena and I had been given the freedom of
the castle, all to ourselves, we would have been air punching with disbelief and
getting giddy all over the place.
‘First girl I ever kissed was in front of the drawbridge,’ he said, slowing to
look towards it as we walked along the gravel path.
‘Did you tell her it was your place?’
‘No. Perhaps I should have done. She dumped me a week later for the boy
who worked in the minimart.’
I turned and stared at him in shock. ‘Not Terry Rowlands? Dark slicked-back
hair, tattoos up to his elbows?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s him.’
‘He still works there, you know. In the minimart. If that makes you feel any
better.’
‘I’m not sure he’d feel entirely envious of where I ended up,’ Will said, and I
stopped talking again.