Me-Before-You-by-Jojo-Moyes

‘Okay. Don’t have a baby. Just don’t go near the door. Don’t answer the
phone. Don’t say a word to them, okay?’
Mum was not amused. She was even less amused after the phone started ringing.
After the fifth call we put all calls through to the answerphone, but we still had
to listen to them, their voices invading our little hallway. There were four or five
of them, all the same. All offering Lou the chance to put her side of ‘the story’,
as they called it. Like Will Traynor was now some commodity that they were all
scrabbling over. The telephone rang and the doorbell rang. We sat with the
curtains closed, listening to the reporters on the pavement just outside our gate,
chatting to each other and speaking on their mobile phones.
It was like being under siege. Mum wrung her hands and shouted through the
letter box for them to get the hell out of our front garden, whenever one of them
ventured past the gate. Thomas gazed out of the upstairs bathroom window and
wanted to know why there were people in our garden. Four of our neighbours
rang, wanting to know what was going on. Dad parked in Ivy Street and came
home via the back garden, and we had a fairly serious talk about castles and
boiling oil.
Then, after I’d thought a bit longer, I rang Patrick and asked him how much he
had got for his sordid little tip. The slight delay before he denied everything told
me all I needed to know.
‘You shitbag,’ I yelled. ‘I’m going to kick your stupid marathon-running shins
so hard you’re going to think 157th was actually a good result.’
Lou just sat in the kitchen and cried. Not proper sobbing, just silent tears that
ran down her face and which she wiped away with the palm of her hand. I
couldn’t think what to say to her.
Which was fine. I had plenty to say to everyone else.
All but one of the reporters cleared off by half past seven. I didn’t know if
they had given up, or if Thomas’s habit of posting bits of Lego out of the letter
box every time they passed another note through had become boring. I told
Louisa to bath Thomas for me, mainly because I wanted her to get out of the
kitchen, but also because that way I could go through all the messages on our
answerphone and delete the newspaper ones while she couldn’t hear me.