Jojo Moyes

chopped all my hair off the following week. I cancelled my plane ticket. I didn’t go out with the girls from my old school again. Mum was too sunk in her own grief to notice, and Dad put any change in mood in our house, and my new habit of locking myself in my bedroom, down to ‘women’s problems’. I had worked out who I was, and it was someone very different from the giggling girl who got drunk with strangers. It was someone who wore nothing that could be construed as suggestive. Clothes that would not appeal to the kind of men who went to the Red Lion, anyway.

Life returned to normal. I took a job at the hairdresser’s, then The Buttered Bun and put it all behind me.
I must have walked past the castle five thousand times since that day.
But I have never been to the maze since.

Before I left for work, I took Will’s letter carefully from the bedside table. I pressed my lips to it, then folded it carefully and put it back in the drawer.

Thank you, I told him silently.

Sometimes Lily lay awake and thought about what it would have been like if her dad had been there. She could picture him in her head. He would have walked outside, grabbed Peter by his neck and told him never to come near his little girl again. He would have put his arms around her and told her it was all okay, that she was safe.

‘You know, falling in love with someone else doesn’t mean that you loved my dad any less. You don’t have to be sad just to stay connected to him.’

pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether lost, whipped away from them or simply vanished into a grave.

Will had done it to all of us, I saw now. He hadn’t meant to, but even in simply refusing to live, he had.

‘You scared me, Ambulance Sam.’

I had somehow found myself on the other side. I had crossed a bridge. Their struggle was no longer my struggle. It wasn’t that I would ever stop grieving for Will, or loving him, or missing him, but that my life seemed to have somehow landed back in the present.

You can set out one morning and step in front of a motorbike and your whole life can change. You can go to work on a routine job and get shot by a teenager who thinks that’s what it takes to be a man.’

‘You can fall off a tall building.’

‘You can. Or you can go to visit a bloke wearing a nightie in a hospital bed and get the best job offer you can imagine.

I tried to show him that he was the answer to a question I hadn’t even known I had been asking.