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.

‘So we’re really left with care assistant.’

‘Wiping old people’s bottoms.’

‘You know, you can only actually help someone who wants to be helped,’

As I left the room, I thought I might have heard him say sorry.

I had a framed photograph at home where I was beaming at Patrick like he had just pulled me from a burning building, yet in reality I had just called him an ‘utter dick’ and he had responded with a hearty, ‘Oh, piss off!’

‘Oh, lighten up, Clark. I’m the one having scalding hot air directed at my genitals.’

Do you want me to leave?’

‘No. Stay for a bit. Talk to me.’

It’s an unfair advantage, being able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair.

This is not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit.