Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)

by Jojo Moyes

I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb—a constant, reflexive thing.

The morning sagged and decided to last for several years. I couldn’t remember the last time minutes and hours stretched so interminably.

She made me feel like a first-class idiot, and consequently I became a first-class idiot around her.

Spring arrived overnight, as if winter, like some unwanted guest, had abruptly shrugged its way into its coat and vanished, without saying good-bye.

I soon realized I was an anomaly—there were no girlfriends like me; everyone else in the club was single, or involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each other in workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts, and carried pictures of each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly comparing joint medals.

Patrick’s job, his whole social life, now revolved around the control of flesh—taming it, reducing it, honing it.

I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.

I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son—my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy—was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore—words

she had never quite lost that sense of being the baby of the family—the deep-rooted feeling that the whole world actually did revolve around her.

“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”

There was an expression of such dejection on her face that even to be in the room felt like intruding.

The flowers in the tubs looked defeated, as if they were already half preparing for autumn.

Just live well. Just live.