Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

The more anxious I grew about how I was going to sober up, the more upbeat
and carefree Will became. The elderly woman on his right turned out to be a
former MP who had campaigned on the rights of the disabled, and she was one
of the few people I had seen talk to Will without the slightest discomfort. At one
point I watched her feed him a slice of roulade. When she briefly got up to leave
the table, he muttered that she had once climbed Kilimanjaro. ‘I love old birds
like that,’ he said. ‘I could just picture her with a mule and a pack of sandwiches.
Tough as old boots.’
I was less fortunate with the man on my left. He took about four minutes – the
briefest of quizzes about who I was, where I lived, who I knew there – to work
out that there was nothing I had to say that might be of interest to him. He turned
back to the woman on his left, leaving me to plough silently through what
remained of my lunch. At one point, when I started to feel properly awkward, I
felt Will’s arm slide off the chair beside me, and his hand landed on my arm. I
glanced up and he winked at me. I took his hand and squeezed it, grateful that he
could see it. And then he moved his chair back six inches, and brought me into
the conversation with Mary Rawlinson.
‘So Will tells me you’re in charge of him,’ she said. She had piercing blue
eyes, and wrinkles that told of a life impervious to skincare routines.
‘I try,’ I said, glancing at him.
‘And have you always worked in this field?’
‘No. I used to … work in a cafe.’ I’m not sure I would have told anybody else
at this wedding that fact, but Mary Rawlinson nodded approvingly.
‘I always thought that might be rather an interesting job. If you like people,
and are rather nosy, which I am.’ She beamed.
Will moved his arm back on to his chair. ‘I’m trying to encourage Louisa to do
something else, to widen her horizons a bit.’
‘What did you have in mind?’ she asked me.
‘She doesn’t know,’ Will said. ‘Louisa is one of the smartest people I know,
but I can’t make her see her own possibilities.’
Mary Rawlinson gave him a sharp look. ‘Don’t patronize her, dear. She’s quite
capable of answering for herself.’
I blinked.
‘I rather think that you of all people should know that,’ she added.