The Reunion

in a hotel for tonight?’ Natalie asked him. Her left arm was pressed against her upper body, her hand gripping her seat belt, knuckles white. With every sharp corner, every lane change, her right hand shot out and grabbed the dashboard. Every time she did it, Andrew tried not to flinch. Natalie didn’t like driving in bad weather.
    ‘Do you remember what it was like up there? The roads are dreadful. Scenic, I think, is the euphemism, meaning winding, narrow, along the edge of a bloody great cliff. And you know how the French drive. It’ll be a nightmare. Plus, we don’t have snow tyres. We should have asked for them, shouldn’t we?’
    ‘It’ll be OK, Nat. I’ll drive slowly. We’re in no hurry.’
    She gave a little sigh. ‘Why don’t we just stop somewhere? And we can drive to Jennifer’s tomorrow, when it’s light, and the weather’s better? If we stop somewhere, I could phone the girls, I don’t seem to have any signal at the moment.’
    Andrew drew a deep breath. ‘Jen’s expecting us, Nat,’ he said, giving his wife a tight little smile. ‘And we rang the girls from Heathrow, they were fine.’
    Just as they’d been fine that morning when he and Natalie left them at their grandparents’ place in Shepton. Fine was an understatement, in fact; they were delighted to see the back of Mum and Dad and didn’t bother hiding it, high-fiving each other as they watched their parents’ car pull out of the driveway, looking forward to four days of endless pre-Christmas shopping trips financed by Grandpa’s credit card and being allowed a glass of sparkling wine before dinner.
    Natalie didn’t like driving in bad weather, it was true, but Andrew was well aware that there was more to her reluctance to take this trip than just that. She hadn’t wanted to leave the girls so close to Christmas and she didn’t share his desire to see the house again. It had taken a fair bit of persuasion to get her to agree to being in the same room as Dan again, too.
    Andrew couldn’t wait. Not to see Dan, though he didn’t mind that. He didn’t harbour grudges with quite the same tenacity as his wife did. He didn’t feel he had the energy. Dan simply wasn’t that important to him any longer. For Andrew, this trip was all about Jen. He felt that he had somehow neglected a duty of care towards her, although Natalie never wasted any time in pointing out that this was ridiculous. It was Jen who had made it impossible for them to be in her life, just as she’d failed to be in theirs. Even so, Andrew couldn’t get past the feeling that there were other things he could have done, should have done. They didn’t talk about it much, because conversations about what happened back then invariably ended in arguments, but when the subject did come up, Natalie always insisted that Jen was not Andrew’s responsibility, and Andrew never once managed to succeed in demonstrating to his wife why he thought that she was.
    More than that, though, he just wanted to see her again, those warm brown eyes, full of laughter. And to see her in that place, too. That would be something.
    ‘I really think,’ Natalie was saying, ‘that we ought to call the girls to let them know that we’ve arrived safely.’
    ‘We’ll call them from Jen’s place,’ Andrew said, ‘when we actually have arrived safely.’ He regretted the words as soon as they came out of his mouth. It wasn’t what he meant, but he’d made it sound as though some other outcome might be a possibility. He reached over and gave her thigh a comforting squeeze. ‘They’re probably not at home anyway, your mum’s almost certainly taken them shopping already.’
    ‘Keep your hands on the wheel, Andrew,’ Natalie said. There were tears in her voice and the overreaction irritated him, but he didn’t say so. Dutifully arranging his hands in the ten to two position, he repeated: ‘It’ll be fine, Nat. I’ll drive slowly.’
    The Moroccan taxi driver was called Khalid. He had a winning smile and the confidence of a Formula One driver.
    ‘I come from Imlil, you know this place? In the mountains of Atlas. Toubkal, you know this place? These roads here like autoroutes compared to there.’
    ‘Great,’ Lilah said, taking another furtive sip from the half jack of vodka they’d bought at duty free. She offered it to Zac, who shook his head.
    ‘You nervous?’ he asked her. She gave a little shrug.
    ‘No need to be afraid,’ Khalid said cheerily. ‘I never have