Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)

by Jojo Moyes

Sometimes I wondered if it was a defense mechanism, whether the only way to cope with his life was to pretend it wasn’t him it was happening to.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life—or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window—is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

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

The snow came so suddenly that I left home under a bright blue sky and not half an hour later I was headed past a castle that looked like a cake decoration, surrounded by a layer of thick white icing.

Here, I could hear my thoughts. I could almost hear my heartbeat. I realized, to my surprise, that I quite liked it.

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

“My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.”

It was deceptive, the sunshine—it promised more than it could actually deliver.

“Girls like Lissa trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else.

I nodded. “They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within five years,” I said. “You’re probably right.”

He smiled then, as if I had amused him. It might sound a bit sad, but Will’s smiles were so rare that prompting one made me feel light-headed with pride.

Sometimes I felt like King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that view might be.

I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish—the small child as well as the man—all that love, all that history.

I would have to fill those little white rectangles with a lifetime of things that could generate happiness, contentment, satisfaction, or pleasure. I would have to fill them with every good experience I could summon up for a man whose powerless arms and legs meant he could no longer make them happen by himself.

I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live.

Will Traynor’s life had been so far beyond the experiences of mine. Who was I to tell him how he should want to live it?

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

“I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.”

Now he was just Will—maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will—who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle.

Just a few weeks away from home could rub the familiarity right off someone.

“A spinal injury doesn’t mean you turn into Quasimodo.

“I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen.”

“Some mistakes…just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let that night be the thing that defines you.”

“Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.”

I had to take my hat off to the girl. If you had told me four months ago that we’d get Will off on a long-haul holiday—hell, that we would get him out of this house—I would have told you that you were a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

And all I can say is that you make me…you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you—even the you that you seem to think is diminished—than with anyone else in the world.”

I led a big life.” His voice had lifted now. “I am not designed to exist in this thing—and yet for all intents and purposes it is now the thing that defines me. It is the only thing that defines me.”

I’m not sure anyone in the world was ever going to persuade that man once he’d set his mind to something. He’s who he is. You can’t make people change who they are.”

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Don’t start panicking, or trying to give it away—it’s not enough for you to sit on your arse for the rest of your life. But it should buy you your freedom, both from that claustrophobic little town we both call home and from the kinds of choices you have so far felt you had to make.

to live boldly. Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride.

Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.

You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt. You changed my life so much more than this money will ever change yours.

Don’t think of me too often. I don’t want to think of you getting all maudlin. Ju...