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.

Their hands briefly clasped, and in that moment I noted that two people could fit all the stereotypes and yet there was something about them that was completely genuine, a delight in each other’s presence.

I’ll wear what I like.

You know what language she speaks? Hypocrisy.

But I promise you, Louisa Clark.’ His voice, when it came, was low and tender. ‘Nobody is ever going to hurt you again.’

Here is the thing about jealousy. It’s not a good look. And the rational part of you knows that.

‘It’s the same sky,’ he said, into the dark. ‘That’s what we have to keep remembering. We’re still under the same sky.’

‘There’s almost not a day that I’m here when I don’t think he’d be proud of me.’

I wasn’t sure men would ever understand the infinitely subtle weaponry women used against each other.