Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘How does he look?’
‘Bit better than this morning,’ I said. ‘He had a drink while I was there. Oh,
and he said something rude about one of the nurses.’
‘Still his impossible self.’
‘Yeah, still his impossible self.’
Just for a moment I saw Mr Traynor’s mouth compress and his eyes glisten.
He looked away at the window and then back at me. I didn’t know whether he
would have preferred it if I’d looked away.
‘Third bout. In two years.’
It took me a minute to catch up. ‘Of pneumonia?’
He nodded. ‘Wretched thing. He’s pretty brave, you know. Under all that
bluster.’ He swallowed and nodded, as if to himself. ‘It’s good you can see it,
Louisa.’
I didn’t know what to do. I reached out a hand and touched his arm. ‘I do see
it.’
He gave me a faint nod, then took his panama hat from the coat hooks in the
hall. Muttering something that might have been a thank you or a goodbye, Mr
Traynor moved past me and out of the front door.
The annexe felt oddly silent without Will in it. I realized how much I had
become used to the distant sound of his motorized chair moving backwards and
forwards, his murmured conversations with Nathan in the next room, the low
hum of the radio. Now the annexe was still, the air like a vacuum around me.
I packed an overnight bag of all the things he might want the next day,
including clean clothes, his toothbrush, hairbrush and medication, plus
earphones in case he was well enough to listen to music. As I did so I had to
fight a peculiar and rising feeling of panic. A subversive little voice kept rising
up inside me, saying, This is how it would feel if he were dead. To drown it out, I
turned on the radio, trying to bring the annexe back to life. I did some cleaning,
made Will’s bed with fresh sheets and picked some flowers from the garden,
which I put in the living room. And then, when I had got everything ready, I
glanced over and saw the holiday folder on the table.
I would spend the following day going through all the paperwork and
cancelling every trip, every excursion I had booked. There was no saying when
Will would be well enough to do any of them. The consultant had stressed that