Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

Just occasionally, something like understanding passed between me and Mrs
Traynor. Her face softened briefly and – without that customary, rigid expression
– I could see suddenly how desperately tired she looked. I think she had aged ten
years in the time that I had been with them.
‘Thank you, Louisa,’ she said. ‘I would very much like to nip home and
change my clothes, if you wouldn’t mind staying with him. I don’t really want
Will to be left alone right now.’
After she’d gone I went in, closing the door behind me, and sat down beside
him. He seemed curiously absent, as if the Will I knew had gone on a brief trip
somewhere else and left only a shell. I wondered, briefly, if that was how it was
when people died. Then I told myself to stop thinking about death.
I sat and watched the clock tick and heard the occasional murmuring voices
outside and the soft squeak of shoes on the linoleum. Twice a nurse came in and
checked various levels, pressed a couple of buttons, took his temperature, but
still Will didn’t stir.
‘He is … okay, isn’t he?’ I asked her.
‘He’s asleep,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘It’s probably the best thing for him right
now. Try not to worry.’
It’s an easy thing to say. But I had a lot of time to think, in that hospital room.
I thought about Will and the frightening speed with which he had become
dangerously ill. I thought about Patrick, and the fact that even as I had collected
my things from his flat, unpeeled and rolled up my wall calendar, folded and
packed the clothes I had laid so carefully in his chest of drawers, my sadness was
never the crippling thing I should have expected. I didn’t feel desolate, or
overwhelmed, or any of the things you should feel when you split apart a love of
several years. I felt quite calm, and a bit sad and perhaps a little guilty – both at
my part in the split, and the fact that I didn’t feel the things I probably should. I
had sent him two text messages, to say I was really, really sorry, and that I hoped
he would do really well in the Xtreme Viking. But he hadn’t replied.
After an hour, I leant over, lifted the blanket from Will’s arm, and there, pale
brown against the white sheet, lay his hand. A cannula was taped to the back of it
with surgical tape. When I turned it over, the scars were still livid on his wrists. I
wondered, briefly, if they would ever fade, or if he would be permanently
reminded of what he had tried to do.