Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)

by Jojo Moyes

It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man—the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring—you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.

“There’s one thing this Matt Ridley bloke hasn’t factored in,” I said. Will looked up from his computer screen. “Oh yes?” “What if the genetically superior male is actually a bit of a dickhead?”

I am the one in the family who knows everything. I read more than anyone else. I go to the university. I am the one who is supposed to have all the answers.

I thought about Thomas waiting to die in some strange country, and as soon as that thought came to mind it made something inside me actually flip over, it was so hideous. So I stuck that in the back of my mental filing cabinet too, under the drawer labeled: Unthinkable