The Reunion

Lilah. Thirteen years.’
    ‘Lucky for some,’ she said. She picked up the wine bottle and poured the last few drops into her glass. She turned to Zac and said: ‘The last time I saw Dan was for the première of his first film.
One Day in June
. It was quite successful, wasn’t it, Dan? You must have made quite a bit of money.’
    Dan nodded. He kept his eyes on Lilah’s face because he couldn’t bear to look at Jen’s. Of course, he’d known this was coming. He’d prepared himself for a discussion about that film at some point. He’d just hoped there would be a gentler run-in, not Lilah with daggers drawn, on the offensive. He’d hoped to be able to talk to Jen about it alone.
    ‘What was the film about?’ Zac asked politely, and Dan wanted dearly at that moment to punch him in the face.
    He took a deep breath. ‘Well, it was…’
    ‘It was supposed to be about Dan’s miserable childhood,’ Lilah cut in loudly. She picked up the wine bottle and then put it down again. Jen got to her feet to fetch another one. ‘But in fact, it wasn’t really about him at all. It was about us, about some things that happened to us, and about what terrible people we all were and how wonderful Dan was…’
    ‘That is
not
true, Lilah.’
    Jen came back to the table with another bottle.
    ‘Am I being unfair, Jen? What did you think of it?’
    Dan could hardly bear to look up at her, but when he did, he didn’t see anger or sadness, he saw embarrassment.
    ‘Well, I thought…’
    She hadn’t seen it. It had never occurred to him before that she wouldn’t have watched it, but right then, he knew. ‘Well, the thing is…’ she tried again.
    ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’ Dan asked her.
    She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t shown in the cinema in France,’ she said with an apologetic smile. It was, actually, but he didn’t bother to correct her, he just smiled and let her pour him another glass of wine.
    He ought to feel relieved. He wasn’t sure how she’d have reacted to it, she might have hated it. The others did, after all. But he wasn’t relieved, he was disappointed. He wanted to know what she felt when she watched it, if she recognised the scenes that she’d influenced, all that time ago, when they’d spent all those nights talking about it. Lilah was right that he’d made a lot of money from the film; it had opened doors for him, it had set his career in motion. It cost him though, he’d paid a price. And if she hadn’t seen it, never even wanted to see it, well. Perhaps the price looked a little high.
    Dan pushed his seat back, about to make his excuses, get to his feet, go to his room out back, away from them all, to call Claudia, forget about this whole wash of an evening, but Lilah wasn’t finished.
    ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen his film, Jen,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.
    ‘Well, you know, as I said…’
    ‘It’s available on DVD,’ Lilah said cheerfully. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting.’
    ‘Lilah,’ Dan said, ‘let’s just leave this now, OK?’
    ‘No, why? It’s your
masterpiece
. And Jen comes out of it pretty well, doesn’t she? A little fickle, I suppose, a bit flighty…’ The look on Lilah’s face was pure malice. ‘Hopping from one thing to another…’
    ‘Lilah, come on.’
    ‘
I,
on the other hand, come across as a vacuous, drug-addled bitch, don’t I?’
    ‘Jesus, Lilah!’ Dan got to his feet. ‘It’s fiction! Jen’s not in the film, and neither are you.
Fiction
, OK? It even says so at the beginning: all resemblance to personages living or dead, blah, blah, blah.’
    ‘If you say so, Dan,’ Lilah said, a thin smile on her lips, one eyebrow raised. She leaned forward and tapped her cigarette on the edge of his glass, flicking the ash into his wine.
    An hour later he lay on the bed in the barn listening to the sound of the building creaking. The wind was getting up. He shivered despite the warmth of the room, imagining what it must be like to be out in this weather, up on the hills behind the house or in the woods. He slipped off the bed and clambered down the ladder to make sure that the sliding door was locked, trying vainly to push from his mind a hundred horror movie images, things coming in from the cold, looking for warmth, looking for food. He’d always had a somewhat overactive imagination.
    Dan looked at his phone to check the time. It was almost midnight. He was mildly disappointed that he’d no missed calls