Genre: Adult Fiction (Contemporary Romance)
Date Published: December 31, 2012
Publisher: Penguin Books
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars, discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You, After You, and Still Me.
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?
Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.
Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .
For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
I really need air. I open the hall window and climb unsteadily up the fire escape until I am on the roof.
The first time I’d come up, nine months earlier, the estate agent showed me how the previous tenants had made a small terrace garden, dotting around a few lead planters and a small bench. “It’s not officially yours, obviously,” he’d said. “But yours is the only flat with direct access to it. I think it’s pretty nice. You could even have a party up here!” I had gazed at him, wondering if I really looked like the kind of person who held parties.
The plants have long since withered and died. I am apparently not very good at looking after things. Now I stand on the roof, staring out at London’s winking darkness below. Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace.
The sodium lights glitter as the sounds of the city filter up into the night air, engines rev, doors slam. From several miles south comes the distant brutalist thump of a police helicopter, its beam scanning the dark for some vanished miscreant in a local park. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. Always a siren. “Won’t take much to make this feel like home,” the real estate agent had said. I had almost laughed. The city feels as alien to me as it always has. But then everywhere does these days.
I hesitate, then take a step out onto the parapet, my arms lifted out to the side, a slightly drunken tightrope walker. One foot in front of the other, edging along the concrete, the breeze making the hairs on my outstretched arms prickle. When I first moved down here, when it all first hit me hardest, I would sometimes dare myself to walk from one end of my block to the other. When I reached the other end I would laugh into the night air. You see? I am here—staying alive—right out on the edge. I am doing what you told me!
It has become a secret habit: me, the city skyline, the comfort of the dark, and the anonymity and the knowledge that up here nobody knows who I am.
I lift my head, feel the night breezes, hear the sound of laughter below and the muffled smash of a bottle breaking, see the traffic snaking up toward the city, the endless red stream of taillights, an automotive blood supply. It is always busy here, above the noise and chaos. Only the hours between 3 to 5 a.m. are relatively peaceful, the drunks having collapsed into bed, the restaurant chefs having peeled off their whites, the pubs having barred their doors. The silence of those hours is interrupted only sporadically, by the night tankers, the opening up of the Jewish bakery along the street, the soft thump of the newspaper delivery vans dropping their paper bales. I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep.
Somewhere down there a lock-in is taking place in the White Horse, full of hipsters and East Enders, and a couple are arguing outside, and across the city the general hospital is picking up the pieces of the sick and the injured and those who have just barely scraped through another day. Up here is just the air and the dark and somewhere the FedEx freight flight from LHR to Beijing, and countless travelers, like Mr. Scotch Drinker, on their way to somewhere new.
“Eighteen months. Eighteen whole months. So when is it going to be enough?” I say into the darkness. And there it is, I can feel it boiling up again, this unexpected anger. I take two steps along, glancing down at my feet. “Because this doesn’t feel like living. It doesn’t feel like anything.”
Two steps. Two more. I will go as far as the corner tonight.
“You didn’t give me a bloody life, did you? Not really. You just smashed up my old one. Smashed it into little pieces. What am I meant to do with what’s left? When is it going to feel—”
I stretch out my arms, feeling the cool night air against my skin, and realize I am crying again.
“F*** you, Will,” I whisper. “F*** you for leaving me.”
Grief wells up again like a sudden tide, intense, overwhelming. And just as I feel myself sinking into it, a voice says, from the shadows: “I don’t think you should stand there.”
I half turn, and catch a flash of a small, pale face on the fire escape, dark eyes wide open. In shock, my foot slips on the parapet, my weight suddenly on the wrong side of the drop. My heart lurches a split second before my body follows. And then, like a nightmare, I am weightless, in the abyss of the night air, my legs flailing above my head as I hear the shriek that may be my own—
Crunch
And then all is black.
The first time I’d come up, nine months earlier, the estate agent showed me how the previous tenants had made a small terrace garden, dotting around a few lead planters and a small bench. “It’s not officially yours, obviously,” he’d said. “But yours is the only flat with direct access to it. I think it’s pretty nice. You could even have a party up here!” I had gazed at him, wondering if I really looked like the kind of person who held parties.
The plants have long since withered and died. I am apparently not very good at looking after things. Now I stand on the roof, staring out at London’s winking darkness below. Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace.
The sodium lights glitter as the sounds of the city filter up into the night air, engines rev, doors slam. From several miles south comes the distant brutalist thump of a police helicopter, its beam scanning the dark for some vanished miscreant in a local park. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. Always a siren. “Won’t take much to make this feel like home,” the real estate agent had said. I had almost laughed. The city feels as alien to me as it always has. But then everywhere does these days.
I hesitate, then take a step out onto the parapet, my arms lifted out to the side, a slightly drunken tightrope walker. One foot in front of the other, edging along the concrete, the breeze making the hairs on my outstretched arms prickle. When I first moved down here, when it all first hit me hardest, I would sometimes dare myself to walk from one end of my block to the other. When I reached the other end I would laugh into the night air. You see? I am here—staying alive—right out on the edge. I am doing what you told me!
It has become a secret habit: me, the city skyline, the comfort of the dark, and the anonymity and the knowledge that up here nobody knows who I am.
I lift my head, feel the night breezes, hear the sound of laughter below and the muffled smash of a bottle breaking, see the traffic snaking up toward the city, the endless red stream of taillights, an automotive blood supply. It is always busy here, above the noise and chaos. Only the hours between 3 to 5 a.m. are relatively peaceful, the drunks having collapsed into bed, the restaurant chefs having peeled off their whites, the pubs having barred their doors. The silence of those hours is interrupted only sporadically, by the night tankers, the opening up of the Jewish bakery along the street, the soft thump of the newspaper delivery vans dropping their paper bales. I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep.
Somewhere down there a lock-in is taking place in the White Horse, full of hipsters and East Enders, and a couple are arguing outside, and across the city the general hospital is picking up the pieces of the sick and the injured and those who have just barely scraped through another day. Up here is just the air and the dark and somewhere the FedEx freight flight from LHR to Beijing, and countless travelers, like Mr. Scotch Drinker, on their way to somewhere new.
“Eighteen months. Eighteen whole months. So when is it going to be enough?” I say into the darkness. And there it is, I can feel it boiling up again, this unexpected anger. I take two steps along, glancing down at my feet. “Because this doesn’t feel like living. It doesn’t feel like anything.”
Two steps. Two more. I will go as far as the corner tonight.
“You didn’t give me a bloody life, did you? Not really. You just smashed up my old one. Smashed it into little pieces. What am I meant to do with what’s left? When is it going to feel—”
I stretch out my arms, feeling the cool night air against my skin, and realize I am crying again.
“F*** you, Will,” I whisper. “F*** you for leaving me.”
Grief wells up again like a sudden tide, intense, overwhelming. And just as I feel myself sinking into it, a voice says, from the shadows: “I don’t think you should stand there.”
I half turn, and catch a flash of a small, pale face on the fire escape, dark eyes wide open. In shock, my foot slips on the parapet, my weight suddenly on the wrong side of the drop. My heart lurches a split second before my body follows. And then, like a nightmare, I am weightless, in the abyss of the night air, my legs flailing above my head as I hear the shriek that may be my own—
Crunch
And then all is black.
Check out my review of the first book in this trilogy!
Moyes studied at Royal Holloway, University of London. She won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to study journalism at City University and subsequently worked for The Independent for 10 years. In 2001 she became a full time novelist.
Moyes' novel Foreign Fruit won the Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA) Romantic Novel of the Year in 2004.
She is married to journalist Charles Arthur and has three children.
To learn more about Jojo Moyes and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
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