The Reunion

to stay. Perhaps today would be the day, perhaps today they’d decide it.
    They still tiptoed around each other a little. They were still getting used to each other, being here alone, together at last after so long, they were still figuring out whether that thing they had all those years ago, was it really still there or did it just seem like it? When he looked at her, in a certain way, an old way she remembered from long ago, she felt her stomach flip and her heart race, the colour come to her cheeks. It was exciting but it wasn’t how she remembered love.
    It was a long time since she’d loved anyone, she couldn’t remember how it was you recognised it, how it was you knew for sure. She thought she loved Nicolas, but now could clearly see that was just infatuation; she knew she’d never really loved Jean-Luc. So that took her all the way back to Conor, and she wasn’t sure she trusted her memory of what that felt like now. Sometimes you had to look from the outside, didn’t you, sometimes others could see something that you couldn’t for yourself. Lilah saw it, she said it on the beach that day, she said it was plain for everyone to see, that Jen was in love with him.
    It happened in the first days they were alone, after Lilah was gone and everyone left. They were sitting in the living room after dinner, listening to music, and a song came on, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, and Dan bowed his head and started to cry. Jen couldn’t remember seeing him cry, not ever, not in all the years she’d known him. She knelt at his feet, as he had at hers not all that long ago, and he looked at her and smiled through tears.
    ‘This was on the mix tape,’ he said. ‘The one I made for you. After. I never gave it to you. Because. But I used to listen to it all the time, all the time, after Conor died. Just brings it back. All that. And now all this. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s really gone.’ He shook his head and she put her hands on the back of his neck and kissed his mouth, murmuring softly to him, that she loved him, that she wanted to be with him. She wasn’t sure whether it was just comfort, whether it would just be one night, or two, or a lifetime, but they were here now, and they would see. They had their chance.
    And it felt like a sign, a good one, when the next day she found a note, tucked into a book, from Andrew. He had slipped it into her well-thumbed copy of the Larousse French-English dictionary, just the way Conor used to, only it was not a love note but an apology, and a blessing. It shouldn’t matter whether he accepted her feelings for Dan or not, but it did.
    So now, they had their chance, at something like normality. Jen put the coffee machine on and lit the wood burner, she sat down at the table and looked out across the front lawn. You couldn’t see further than the stone wall, the cloud had descended so it obscured the view of the valley. She remembered how she’d felt this time last year, when it was just her and the baby in her belly, how frightening she’d found this house, the darkness, the quiet, the smell of cold stone, the wind screaming in the trees, the shadows in the corners. It didn’t feel like that any longer: with the fires lit it was as warm and welcoming and cosy a place as you could imagine, it had lost its sense of abandonment, become a home. It was no longer quiet, not with Isabelle chattering and Dan’s music playing.
    Last year, she’d felt haunted, and though the ghosts remained, she found she didn’t mind them quite so much. She’d had trepidations, of course she had, about moving back into her old room, a room she’d shared with Conor all those years ago, the place where Lilah died – was it really a room in which Dan and she could sleep peacefully, undisturbed? They slept fine. She didn’t mind so much, the feeling that they weren’t entirely alone, that there were shadows, echoes ever present, in dark corners and up in the attic, on the lawn out front by the oaks and in the woods behind. It wasn’t such a frightening thing after all; there was comfort in it, the familiar kind, offered by old friends.

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