The Reunion

hands clasped in front of him, head bowed as though in prayer. His clothes were soaked through.
    Natalie sat down at his side, and he placed a sodden arm around her shoulders.
    ‘I keep asking myself,’ he said, ‘keep asking everyone, what shall I do? She was… she’d become everything to me. I just don’t know what to do.’
    ‘Go home, work. Lean heavily on your family, on your friends. Lean on us, you have us. Andrew and I are in Reading, the girls would love to see you any chance you have to visit. Honestly, they both fancy you something rotten. They’d
love
to show you off to their friends. Dan will welcome you here any time, you know that.’
    He nodded, but he didn’t look up at her, he sank lower onto his log. He looked as though he might slide right off it, down into the mud, as though he might disappear and lose the light. It made her fearful, but she had nothing more for him, no more words of comfort, so she got to her feet and reached for his hand and said, ‘Please come inside, you’ll catch your death out here.’
    He looked up at her, and he smiled, she couldn’t tell if he was crying or whether it was just the rain. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. ‘All of you. Which is odd, because if you’d asked me in December, I’d have said I’d happily never lay eyes on any of you ever again.’
    He got to his feet, bent down to kiss her cheek. ‘I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘that in the end she had you here.’
    On their way back, just as they were leaving the wood, Natalie slipped and fell in the mud. Zac picked her up and carried her all the way to the house.
    Dan drove him to the airport that afternoon. It was dark when he returned, the wind picking up, rain battering down, splashing mud up as high as the windows. The house was quiet: Isabelle and Jen were sleeping upstairs, Andrew was reading in the living room. The silence was heavy. Natalie climbed the stairs and walked along the corridor to the main bedroom, what had once been Jen’s and latterly Lilah’s. The door was closed. She hadn’t been into that room for almost a week, not since the very end.
    Natalie pushed the door open and closed it behind her. The room was empty – Lilah’s things were all gone, packed away into boxes by Jen and Dan or into suitcases by Zac. The bed was stripped. Natalie didn’t know where the sheets had gone, the ones they’d wrapped her in. Would they be washed and re-used, thrown away, burned? She sat down on the bare mattress, curled her legs up underneath her and lay down. There was nothing left of her here, no scent of her perfume, no strands of her hair, no echo of her laughter, there was nothing.
    Natalie cried until she had nothing left.
    She longed to be with her daughters, sitting on the sofa with them, one on either side, a blanket thrown over their legs, Grace’s head on her shoulder, Charlotte’s arm linked through hers, watching
The X Factor
. She longed for their life, the good one they’d built, for Andrew washing the car on a Sunday afternoon, for walking on the Common after Sunday lunch. She longed for Andrew. She got up and went to look for him.
    She got halfway down the stairs and stopped. She could hear Andrew talking, he was in the kitchen, he was talking to Dan. She sat on the stairs and listened. They were talking about Jen.
    ‘Is she going to stay with you?’ Andrew asked him.
    ‘We haven’t discussed it,’ Dan said, his voice clipped and clear.
    ‘It would seem,’ Andrew said, ‘like a good arrangement.’
    ‘A good arrangement? What on earth does that mean?’
    Andrew sighed. ‘Fuck it, Dan. I’m trying to say… I think you should be with her.’ There was a long pause. ‘I’m trying to say sorry.’
    ‘Oh? That was an apology?’ Dan laughed.
    ‘I’m very sorry for what I said.’
    ‘I know, man. I know where you were coming from, I know how you feel about her, I just know. I was pissed off, but not that pissed off. I know what all this means to you, this place, her, Conor’s memory.’
    ‘But it’s good, her being here, isn’t it? Her and the baby, it seems to work.’
    ‘I hope it does. I hope it could.’
    ‘It would be good to know that she’s with someone who loves her, who loves Isabelle.’
    ‘And I do.’
    ‘I know you do.’
    It went quiet for a while, then Dan said: ‘The thing I worry about, the thing that I keep wondering…’ He tailed off.
    ‘What? What is it?’
    ‘What if she never looks at me that way? The way she looked