The Reunion

sworn that as he looked up at them, Jen was pulling away from Dan. Jen was angry with him. They must have had a row. That had to be it: that’s why Dan put the music up so loud, why Jen was so quiet, why they were eyeing each other angrily in the rear-view mirror.
    It was probably something about the screenplay that Dan was writing. Jen had been his official reader since last summer; apparently she was his most perspicacious critic. Presumably she’d said something he didn’t agree with. Jen wasn’t a great puller of punches when it came to things she liked and didn’t like. Conor immediately felt better having figured this out. A falling-out over artistic differences? It would blow over by this evening.
    Conor leaned his head against the window and watched the scrubby embankments and service stations of the M3 whizz by until they became a blur. His head drooped, his chin nodding towards his chest. His mind, though, kept ticking over.
    It was a little odd, though, that Jen hadn’t mentioned falling out with Dan. It was the sort of thing she would usually have told him about. Whenever she had a row with Lilah or got pissed off with Andrew about something, Conor got the blow-by-blow account. More detail than he needed, to be honest. So why hadn’t she mentioned this?
    When he thought about it carefully, he wasn’t entirely sure it could be something about the film script. Or at the very least, not something trivial, because, now he considered the matter, things hadn’t been right with Dan and Jen for a while. When Dan was staying with them, those two were thick as thieves, and then when Dan left it seemed like every time Conor got home from work late, Jen was sitting on the sofa, legs tucked up beneath her, nattering away to him on the phone. But he hadn’t come home to that in a long while.
    He sat up straighter in his seat, opened the window a crack to get some air. Outside, the motorway roared. How could he not have noticed this before? Something had happened between Dan and Jen, and not recently either. Something Jen had never told him about. That sense of unease he had earlier grew, started to morph into something else, something which felt like dread.
    Conor shifted a little in his seat, sliding over to his left so that he was up against the passenger door. From that position he could just about see Jen’s face in the side mirror. She was looking out of the window, her expression blank, but her hand was clasped around the base of her throat. She was feeling nervous, vulnerable. He
knew
her.
    He shut out the music, trying to remember the last time he talked to Jen about Dan, the last time he could remember her even mentioning Dan’s name. It wouldn’t come to him. He couldn’t believe that he’d been so caught up in himself that he hadn’t noticed a change like this. Conor’s mouth felt dry, his lower back damp with sweat. He rolled the window down a little further, took a deep gulp of hot, dirty air. Pure carbon monoxide.
    It wasn’t true, was it, that he hadn’t noticed a change? He
had
noticed a change in Jen, he just hadn’t connected it to Dan. Earlier he’d thought about how Jen’s moods, her slide from happiness to sadness, had no rhyme or reason. Maybe he was wrong about that. Maybe the rhyme and reason was sitting right next to him in the driver’s seat.
    He looked across at Dan, who glanced back at him, cocking his head a little, quizzically. He smiled, but the smile died right there on his lips.
    ‘You OK?’ Dan asked, and when Conor didn’t reply, Dan looked back at the road, but Conor could still see the expression spreading across his face. Defensiveness? Guilt? What did Dan have to feel guilty about? Conor kept staring at him, saw Dan swallow hard, looking as though he’d been caught doing something wrong, as though he’d been caught red-handed. He’d seen that look on Dan’s face before, not all that long ago. The barbecue, when he caught Dan coming out of the room, just after Conor had asked him to leave Jen to rest; the expression on his face was exactly like the one he wore now. And when Conor went in to see Jen he could tell that she’d been crying.
    Something was not right.
    It seemed to Conor that, where before he’d only been able to see puzzle pieces, now he was beginning to see a picture. Jen had lied to him. They had had a row, and the next day, when he was gone, she went to the cinema, and she lied to him about going alone. She went to the Barbican, she