Me Before You: a novel

never really there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the
absence he was always striving to impress.
“He’ll change his mind,” Steven said. “There’s still a long way to
go.”
We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against
the warmth given out by the fire.
“I keep thinking…,” I said, staring into the hearth. “I still keep
thinking that I’m missing something.”
My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me,
but I couldn’t meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me
then. But I think we had probably gone too far for that.

---

He took a sip of his drink. “You can only do what you can do,
darling.”
“I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?”
He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I
turned and quietly left the room.
As he had known I would.
When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I
was quite sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I
stayed quite calm when I realized what it was he was proposing, and
then I told him he was being ridiculous and I walked straight out of
the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being able to walk away from a
man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the annex and
the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse
them. I shut the door of the annex and I stood in my own hallway
with the calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.
I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.
He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last
word. He repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I
almost had to persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live
like this, Mother. This is not the life I chose. There is no prospect of
my recovery, hence it is a perfectly reasonable request to ask to end
it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could well imagine what he
had been like in those business meetings, the career that had made
him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard,
after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to
dictate his future, that I had somehow become Mother again.
It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion
forbade it—although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell
through his own desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe
that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive
us our trespasses.)
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.
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.
And then on January 22, a day when I was stuck in court with a
relentless roll call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping,
angry ex-partners, Steven walked into the annex and found our son
almost unconscious, his head lolling by his armrest, a sea of dark,
sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had located a rusty nail,
barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished woodwork
in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had moved his
wheelchair backward and forward until his flesh was sliced to
ribbons. I cannot to this day imagine the determination that kept him
going, even though he must have been half delirious from the pain.
The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes from death.