Free The Reunion by Amy Silver Page A

touched, everywhere we’d been together. I meant to come back. Only, I got stuck. It’s difficult to explain. I said that already, didn’t I?’
    She looked up at their faces, all of them were watching her intently, expressions ranging from the compassionate to the quizzical. ‘You think this is ridiculous. It sounds so self-indulgent.’ Jen couldn’t miss the dip of Natalie’s eyes, silent acquiescence. ‘I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. For running away. For making things worse.’
    There was a moment of silence, then Lilah spoke.
    ‘So what happened? We heard you went to Ireland, to stay with Conor’s mother. Which, to be honest, Jen, doesn’t sound much like
getting away from everything he touched
.’
    ‘That was only for a few weeks, Lilah. I went back to my parents after that, and then I got a job offer in Paris and it sounded like the perfect thing. I could go for six months, a year, get my head straight, come back. We could pick up again, we would be together again.’
    ‘Only you didn’t come back.’ Dan had that look again, that cool detachment, as though he were watching her at one remove.
    ‘As I said, I was stuck. The story I’d written for myself, about what happened, to us, to Conor, about how I was going to live with it, to cope, it became this inescapable thing, as though it had its own life. It took over mine.’
    ‘But you did move on, didn’t you?’ Natalie said. ‘You got married to Jean-Luc, you made a life for yourself.’
    ‘And it didn’t work out. It felt as though I wasn’t on the right road, as though I’d taken a diversion. And it wasn’t fair on him. He was a good man and I made him unhappy. So the marriage ended, and I tried to start again.’ She turned her coffee cup in her hands, round and round. ‘There was someone else. I met someone else, a long time after Jean-Luc. Nicolas. It felt different this time, it felt real, as real as anything I’ve felt since Conor.’
    She ran the fingers of her right hand along the surface of the table, all the way to the corner.
    ‘Do you remember the grand unveiling?’ she asked them. Dan looked down, surprised.
    ‘This is it? This is Conor’s table? It’s still here? God, I didn’t realise…’
    ‘He worked on it all summer,’ Nat said, she too now touching its surface with her fingertips. ‘It was supposed to be a secret, only everyone found out apart from Jen.’
    ‘And we all had to act really surprised when he uncovered it,’ Lilah went on, ‘but it was totally obvious we all knew what it was because we were really rubbish actors.’
    ‘But we didn’t know what was underneath,’ Andrew said. One by one, they all slipped down off their chairs until the five of them were crouched beneath the table, necks bent at awkward angles, trying to get a look at the carving in the underside of the wood. Around the edges, their names: Jennifer Donleavy, Andrew Moorcroft, Lilah Lewis, Dan Parker, Natalie Hewson, Conor Sheridan; and in the centre, ‘For all of us, forever’, and the date: 21 August 1995.
    Andrew banged his head crawling back out from under the table. There were tears in his eyes and Jen wondered if he’d knocked his head on purpose, so that the others wouldn’t see him crying. Nat put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
    ‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘he’d set up a kind of workshop in that old woodshed out back – I don’t think it’s there any longer, is it?’
    ‘No, it must have been knocked down at some point,’ Jen said. ‘There’s a new, smarter one now.’
    ‘He used to sneak out there all the time, often late at night, and he’d get really, really arsey if you tried to get a look inside.’
    ‘We called it his wanking shed,’ Lilah said, and she caught Nat’s eye and they both started to giggle.
    ‘I remember the night we carried the table in here,’ Dan said, turning to Andrew.
    ‘And you and I were supposed to carry the thing without