Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

cover of a blanket. The airline staff were solicitous and discreet, and careful with
the chair. Will was, as promised, loaded first, achieved transfer to his seat with
no bruising, and then settled in between us.
Within an hour of being in the air I realized that, oddly enough, above the
clouds, provided his seat was tilted and he was wedged in enough to be stable,
Will was pretty much equal to anyone in the cabin. Stuck in front of a screen,
with nowhere to move and nothing to do, there was very little, 30,000 feet up,
that separated him from any of the other passengers. He ate and watched a film,
and mostly he slept.
Nathan and I smiled cautiously at each other and tried to behave as if this
were fine, all good. I gazed out of the window, my thoughts as jumbled as the
clouds beneath us, unable yet to think about the fact that this was not just a
logistical challenge but an adventure for me – that I, Lou Clark, was actually
headed to the other side of the world. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see anything
beyond Will by then. I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to
Thomas. ‘It’s like I’m looking through a funnel,’ she had said, gazing at his
newborn form. ‘The world has just shrunk to me and him.’
She had texted me when I was in the airport.
You can do this. Am bloody proud of you xxx
I called it up now, just to look at it, feeling suddenly emotional, perhaps because
of her choice of words. Or perhaps because I was tired and afraid and still
finding it hard to believe that I had even got us this far. Finally, to block my
thoughts, I turned on my little television screen, gazing unseeing at some
American comedy series until the skies around us grew dark.
And then I woke to find that the air stewardess was standing over us with
breakfast, that Will was talking to Nathan about a film they had just watched
together, and that – astonishingly, and against all the odds – the three of us were
less than an hour away from landing in Mauritius.
I don’t think I believed that any of this could actually happen until we touched
down at Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport. We emerged
groggily through Arrivals, still stiff from our time in the air, and I could have
wept with relief at the sight of the operator’s specially adapted taxi. That first
morning, as the driver sped us towards the resort, I registered little of the island.