Me Before You: A Novel

the sky and I had to squint to see him. ‘So … um … where in London are you based?’
    ‘Regent Street.’
    ‘
The
Regent Street? Nice.’
    ‘Yes. Not a bad place to be. Right. Thank you for the coffee, Miss … ’
    ‘Clark. Louisa Clark.’
    He stopped then and looked at me for a moment, and I wondered whether he had sussed my inadequate attempts to work out who he might be.
    ‘Ah. Miss Clark,’ he said, his professional smile swiftly reinstated. ‘Thank you, anyway.’
    He put his briefcase carefully on the back seat, climbed into his car and was gone.
    That night, I stopped off at the library on my way home to Patrick’s. I could have used his computer, but I still felt like I should ask, and this just seemed easier. I sat down at the terminal, and typed ‘Michael Lawler’ and ‘Regent Street, London’ into the search engine.
Knowledge is power, Will
, I told him, silently.
    There were 3,290 results, the first three of which revealed a ‘Michael Lawler, practitioner at law, specialist in wills, probate and power of attorney’ based in that same street. I stared at the screen for a few minutes, then I typed in his name again, this time against the search engine of images, and there he was, at some Round Table function, in a dark suit – Michael Lawler, specialist in wills and probate, the same man who had spent an hour with Will.
    I moved into Patrick’s that night, in the hour and a half between me finishing work and him heading off to the track. I took everything except my bed and the new blinds. He arrived with his car, and we loaded my belongings into bin bags. Within two trips we had it all – bar my school books in the loft – at his.
    Mum cried; she thought she was forcing me out.
    ‘For goodness’ sake, love. It’s time she moved on. She’s twenty-seven years old,’ my father told her.
    ‘She’s still my baby,’ she said, pressing two tins of fruit cake and a carrier bag of cleaning products into my arms.
    I didn’t know what to say to her. I don’t even like fruit cake.
    It was surprisingly easy, fitting my belongings into Patrick’s flat. He had next to nothing, anyway, and I had almost nothing from years spent in the box room. The only thing we fell out over was my CD collection, which apparently could only be combined with his once I had stickered the backs of mine and sorted them into alphabetical order.
    ‘Make yourself at home,’ he kept saying, as if I were some kind of guest. We were nervous, strangely awkward with each other, like two people on a first date. While I was unpacking, he brought me tea and said, ‘I thought this could be your mug.’ He showed me where everything lived in the kitchen, then said, several times, ‘Of course, put stuff where you want. I don’t mind.’
    He had cleared two drawers and the wardrobe in the spare room. The other two drawers were filled with his fitness clothes. I didn’t know there were so many permutations of Lycra and fleece. My wildly colourful clothes left several feet of space still empty, the wire hangers jangling mournfully in the closet space.
    ‘I’ll have to buy more stuff just to fill it up,’ I said, looking at it.
    He laughed nervously. ‘What’s that?’
    He looked at my calendar, tacked up on the spare-room wall, with its ideas in green and its actual planned events in black. When something had worked (music, wine tasting), I put a smiley face next to it. When it hadn’t (horse racing,art galleries), it stayed blank. There was little marked in for the next two weeks – Will had become bored of the places nearby, and as yet I could not persuade him to venture further afield. I glanced over at Patrick. I could see him eyeing the 12 August date, which was now underlined with exclamation marks in black.
    ‘Um … it’s just reminding me about my job.’
    ‘You don’t think they’re going to renew your contract?’
    ‘I don’t know, Patrick.’
    Patrick took the pen from its clip, looked at the next month, and scribbled under week 28: ‘Time to start job hunting.’
    ‘That way you’re covered for whatever happens,’ he said. He kissed me and left me to it.
    I laid my creams out carefully in the bathroom, tucked my razors, moisturizer and tampons neatly into his mirrored cabinet. I put some books in a neat row along the spare-room floor under the window, including the new titles that Will had ordered from Amazon for me. Patrick promised to put up some shelves when he had a spare