Me Before You: A Novel

to my bag. I rifled through it, looking for the book of Flannery O’Connor short stories. It was as I pulled them from my bag that the envelope fell out.
    I stared at it. Will’s card. I hadn’t opened it at the table. I did so now, feeling an unlikely sponginess at its centre. I slid the card carefully from its envelope, and opened it. Inside were ten crisp £50 notes. I counted them twice, unable to believe what I was seeing. Inside, it read:
Birthday bonus. Don’t fuss. It’s a legal requirement. W.

14
    May was a strange month. The newspapers and television were full of headlines about what they termed ‘the right to die’. A woman suffering from a degenerative disease had asked that the law be clarified to protect her husband, should he accompany her to Dignitas when her suffering became too much. A young football player had committed suicide after persuading his parents to take him there. The police were involved. There was to be a debate in the House of Lords.
    I watched the news reports and listened to the legal arguments from pro-lifers and esteemed moral philosophers, and didn’t quite know where I stood on any of it. It all seemed weirdly unrelated to Will.
    We, in the meantime, had gradually been increasing Will’s outings – and the distance that he was prepared to travel. We had been to the theatre, down the road to see the morris dancers (Will kept a straight face at their bells and hankies, but he had gone slightly pink with the effort), driven one evening to an open-air concert at a nearby stately home (more his thing than mine), and once to the multiplex where, due to inadequate research on my part, we ended up watching a film about a girl with a terminal illness.
    But I knew he saw the headlines too. He had begun using the computer more since we got the new software,and he had worked out how to move a mouse by dragging his thumb across a trackpad. This laborious exercise enabled him to read the day’s newspapers online. I brought him in a cup of tea one morning to find him reading about the young football player – a detailed feature about the steps he had gone through to bring about his own death. He blanked the screen when he realized I was behind him. That small action left me with a lump somewhere high in my chest that took a full half-hour to go away.
    I looked up the same piece at the library. I had begun to read newspapers. I had worked out which of their arguments tended to go deeper – that information wasn’t always at its most useful boiled down to stark, skeletal facts.
    The football player’s parents had been savaged by the tabloid newspapers.
How Could They Let Him Die?
screamed the headlines. I couldn’t help but feel the same way. Leo McInerney was twenty-four. He had lived with his injury for almost three years, so not much longer than Will. Surely he was too young to decide that there was nothing left to live for? And then I read what Will had read – not an opinion piece, but a carefully researched feature about what had actually taken place in this young man’s life. The writer seemed to have had access to his parents.
    Leo, they said, had played football since he was three years old. His whole life was football. He had been injured in what they termed a ‘million to one’ accident when a tackle went wrong. They had tried everything to encourage him, to give him a sense that his life would still hold value. But he had retreated into depression. He was an athlete not just without athleticism, but without even theability to move or, on occasion, breathe without assistance. He gleaned no pleasure from anything. His life was painful, disrupted by infection, and dependent on the constant ministrations of others. He missed his friends, but refused to see them. He told his girlfriend he wouldn’t see her. He told his parents daily that he didn’t want to live. He told them that watching other people live even half the life he had planned for himself was unbearable, a kind of torture.
    He had tried to commit suicide twice by starving himself until hospitalized, and when returned home had begged his parents to smother him in his sleep. When I read that, I sat in the library and stuck the balls of my hands in my eyes until I could breathe without sobbing.
    Dad lost his job. He was pretty brave about it. He came home that afternoon, got changed into a shirt and tie and headed back into town on the next bus, to register at the Job Centre.
    He had already decided, he