Me Before You: a novel

everything.”
Nobody moved.
“Shall I give you a minute?” I said.
“That would be a good idea.” Mrs. Traynor’s knuckles were white
on the arm of the sofa.
I slid out of the room.
“In fact, Louisa, perhaps now would be a good time to take your
lunch break.”
It was going to be a bus shelter kind of a day. I grabbed my
sandwiches from the kitchen, climbed into my coat, and set off down
the back path.
As I left, I could hear Georgina Traynor’s voice lifting inside the
house. “Has it ever occurred to you, Will, that, believe it or not, this
might not be just about you?”

---

When I returned, exactly half an hour later, the house was silent.
Nathan was washing a mug in the kitchen sink.
He turned as he saw me. “How you doing?”
“Has she gone?”
“Who?”
“The sister?”
He glanced behind him. “Ah. That who it was? Yeah, she’s gone.
Just skidding off in her car when I got here. Some sort of family row,
was it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was in the middle of cutting Will’s hair and
this woman came in and just started having a go at him. I assumed it
was another girlfriend.”
Nathan shrugged.
I realized he would not be interested in the personal minutiae of
Will’s life, even if he knew.
“He’s a bit quiet, though. Nice work with the shave, by the way.
Good to get him out from behind all that shrubbery.”
I walked back into the living room. Will was sitting staring at the
television, which was still paused at the exact moment I had left it.
“Do you want me to turn this back on?” I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me for a minute. His head was sunk in his
shoulders, the earlier relaxed expression replaced by a veil. Will was
closed off again, locked behind something I couldn’t penetrate.
He blinked, as if he had only just noticed me there. “Sure,” he
said.
I was carrying a basket of washing down the hall when I heard them.
The annex door was slightly ajar and the voices of Mrs. Traynor and
her daughter carried down the long corridor, the sound coming in
muted waves. Will’s sister was sobbing quietly, all fury gone from her
voice now. She sounded almost childlike.
“There must be something they can do. Some medical advance.
Can’t you take him to America? Things are always improving in
America.”

---

“Your father keeps a very close eye on all the developments. But
no, darling, there is nothing…concrete.”
“He’s so…different now. It’s like he’s determined not to see the
good in anything.”
“He’s been like that since the start, George. I think it’s just that
you didn’t see him apart from when you flew home. Back then, I think
he was still…determined. Back then, he was sure that something
would change.”
I felt a little uncomfortable listening in on such a private
conversation. But the odd tenor drew me closer. I found myself
walking softly toward the door, my socked feet making no sound on
the floor.
“Look, Daddy and I didn’t tell you. We didn’t want to upset you.
But he tried…” She struggled over the words. “Will tried to…he tried
to kill himself.”
“What?”
“Daddy found him. Back in December. It was…it was terrible.”
Even though this really only confirmed what I had guessed, I felt
all the blood drain from me. I heard a muffled cry, a whispered
reassurance. There was another long silence. And then Georgina,
her voice thick with grief, spoke again.
“The girl…?”
“Yes. Louisa is here to make sure nothing like that happens
again.”
I stopped. At the other end of the corridor, from the bathroom, I
could hear Nathan and Will talking in a low murmur, comfortably
oblivious to the conversation that was going on just a few feet away.
I took a step closer to the door. I suppose I had known it since I
caught sight of the scars on his wrists. It made sense of everything,
after all—Mrs. Traynor’s anxiety that I shouldn’t leave Will alone for
very long, his antipathy to having me there, the fact that for large
stretches of time I didn’t feel like I was doing anything useful at all. I
had been babysitting. I hadn’t known it, but Will had, and he had
hated me for it.
I reached for the handle of the door, preparing to close it gently. I
wondered what Nathan knew. I wondered whether Will was happier

---

now. I realized I felt, selfishly, a faint relief that it hadn’t been me Will
objected to, just the fact that I—that anyone—had been employed to
watch over him.
“You can’t let him do this, Mum. You have to stop him.”
“It’s not our choice, darling.”
“But it is. It is—if he’s asking you to be part of it,” Georgina
protested.
The handle stilled in my hand.
“I can’t believe you’re even agreeing to it. What about your
religion? What about everything you’ve done? What was the point in
you even bloody saving him the last time?”
Mrs. Traynor’s voice was deliberately calm. “That’s not fair.”
“But you’ve said you’ll take him. What does—”
“Do you think for a moment that if I said I refuse, he wouldn’t ask
someone else?”
“But Dignitas? It’s just wrong. I know it’s hard for him, but it will
destroy you and Daddy. I know it. Think of how you would feel! Think
of the publicity! Your job! Both your reputations! He must know it. It’s
a selfish thing to even ask. How can he? How can he do this? How
can you do this?” She began to sob again.
“George…”
“Don’t look at me like that. I do care about him, Mummy. I do.
He’s my brother and I love him. But I can’t bear it. I can’t bear even
the thought of it. He’s wrong to ask, and you’re wrong to consider it.
And it’s not just his own life he will destroy if you go ahead with this.”
I took a step back from the window. The blood thumped so loudly
in my ears that I almost didn’t hear Mrs. Traynor’s response.
“Six months, George. He promised to give me six months. Now, I
don’t want you to mention this again, and certainly not in front of
anyone else. And we must…” She took a deep breath. “We must just
pray very hard that something happens in that time to change his
mind.”

---

8
CAMILLA
I never set out to help kill my son.
Even reading the words seems odd—like something you might
see in a tabloid newspaper.
I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I
thought I wasn’t. My life was a fairly structured one—an ordinary
one, by modern standards. I had been married for almost thirty-
seven years, I raised two children, I kept my career, helped out at the
school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children didn’t need
me anymore.
I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years. I watched the
whole of human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who
couldn’t get themselves together sufficiently even to make a court
appointment on time; the repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced
young men and exhausted, debt-ridden mothers. It’s quite hard to
stay calm and understanding when you see the same faces, the
same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the
impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal
of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many
Grade II listed buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from
immune to it. Our Regency Squares held cider-drinking teenagers;
our thatched cottages muffled the sounds of husbands beating their
wives and children. 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 got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the
children grew it had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could
give you the Latin name of almost any plant you cared to point at.
The funny thing was, I didn’t even do Latin at school—mine was a
rather minor public school for girls where the focus was on cooking
and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives—but
the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I
only ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: