Me before you

chapter 11

"Mom, why don't you ever go on dates?"

Sana very nearly choked on her water. "Excuse me? Where is this coming from?"

Louis looked up at her across the dinner table, smiling unaffectedly. He was swinging his legs under the table and toying with the vegetables left on his plate, completely unfazed. "Well, Aunt Chaeyoung is always talking about when she and Nayeon go on dates. And you've been divorced from Dad for months!"

"Yes, I have." Sana agreed. This was probably not a healthy response for a child to have to his parents divorcing. All the articles she'd read online said that children of divorce often acted as a go- between, or wanted their parents to get back together. Absolutely nowhere had she read that they would pressure them into dating other people. "But Chaeyoung and I are different people."

"Yeah," Louis agreed enthusiastically, cutting up his vegetables. "You're prettier than she is."

"Louis!" Sana, for the second time, nearly spat out her water. She took a moment to compose herself before looking her son firmly in the eye. "Firstly, we don't compare women's looks like that. And secondly, that's not got anything to do with it. Dating is complicated." She paused. "So don't you ever grow up and do it."

"Okay," Louis picked at his plate dejectedly for all of a second before lifting his head back to look at his mother again. He was still swinging his legs under the table, but now his small face was screwed up in dissatisfied confusion. "But why is it complicated?"

Sana sighed. "Louis."

Louis sighed. "Mom." He was using her exact tone of voice.

For all his nine-year-old dignity, Sana managed to suppress her laugh. She breathed in. Once more, she composed herself. "It's complicated because I was with your father for a very long time." She explained. "And when you're with one person for that long, you get so used to them that being with other people takes time to adjust to." She breathed out, turning her gaze back down to her fork. "Not to mention there's nobody that likes me that way."

"But why?" Louis asked again, a hint of a whine creeping into his voice.

"Because," Sana told him firmly, trying not laugh at herself, sitting eating dinner in a small town in Maine and discussing her relationship prospects with her nine-year-old son. "There's just not, okay? And I can see you hiding your peas under that piece of lettuce."

It wasn't until later, as she was closing Louis's bedroom door behind her after his nightly story, that she remembered that flicker of something that had crossed Y/n's face just before she snapped the other night, the way she had looked almost afraid before she had pulled back and started shouting.

Sana pulled her silk robe tighter around herself as she crossed the landing, pushing into her own bedroom thinking about walls and defences and wide eyes meeting hers over a cold slice of pie. There's just not, okay?

She felt a frown appear between her eyebrows as she sat down on her bed and began to wonder if that was still true.

+++++

As one of Lincoln's infamous heavy winter rainfalls pounded against the walls and windows of her annex, Y/n sat and finally plugged herself into one of the audiobooks her mom had bought her after the accident.

She'd been meaning to for a while, if only to make Sarah happy, and reading on a rainy day seemed enough like something normal to make Sana happy. Look at me making an effort for her, Y/n thought, while the overly-enthusiastic voice reader rambled on in her ears. It's like I'm growing. She closed her eyes and tried to lose herself in the story like she would have before.