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.

It took weeks for my hands not to feel useless without daily contact with his body: the soft shirt I would button, the warm, motionless hands I would wash gently, the silky hair I could still feel between my fingers.

I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too.

‘You still sleeping in his T-shirt?’

‘No. It stopped smelling of him. And it had started to get a bit unsavoury, if I’m honest. I washed it and I’ve packed it in tissue. But I’ve got his jumper for bad days.’

‘Did I imagine it all, Nathan? Sometimes I think I’ve made what happened between Will and me so much bigger in my head. Like how can I have loved someone that much in such a short time? And all these things I think about the two of us – did we actually feel what I remember? The further we get from it, the more those six months just seems like this weird … dream.’

‘Also that I’m living a life that is so much less than the one I promised him I’d live.

‘Fine,’ Sam said, glancing sideways at me. ‘There you go. Universal response of all teenagers to everything. War, famine, lottery wins, global fame. It’s all fine.’

With Will I had never had to consider what I said: talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.

And all the while a voice kept saying: What on earth are you doing?