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.

And it means … ’ He hesitated.

‘It means what?’

‘ … that one day you can go off and spread your wings without worrying about how your parents are going to be able to support themselves.’

‘Even when I was a teenager my dad would never have let me go out with an older man.’

‘Not even if he had his own castle?’

I had known then, just from the feel of his hands on my waist. I had realized that some balance had shifted, that some restraint on behaviour had begun to evaporate.

I cried then. Not sobbing, this time. The tears left me silently, and told me something else was leaving me. Guilt. Fear. A few other things I hadn’t yet found words for.

‘You’re going to say there are rides specially for handicapped people next, aren’t you?’

I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around his neck, letting my cheek rest against his, breathing in the citrus smell of his aftershave. I could feel him humming along with the music.

‘You know, you would never have let those breasts so close to me if I weren’t in a wheelchair,’ he murmured.

I looked back at him steadily. ‘You would never have looked at my breasts if you hadn’t been in a wheelchair.’

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