The Reunion

going to tell me, are you?’ Natalie whispered at him. ‘You’re just going to leave me to wonder…’
    ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Nat. I shouldn’t have to dignify this…’ He broke off, shook his head. He was bright red in the face. He got to his feet and walked towards the doorway. ‘I think it’s time we went to bed, don’t you? This isn’t getting us anywhere, we’re both tired, and you’re in pain, I can see that…’
    ‘Don’t use my pain. Don’t make excuses for me. And don’t tell me what you see when you can’t even look at me.’
    ‘I can see when it’s bad, Natalie. I’ve lived with you through this for sixteen years…’
    ‘Oh, congratulations,’ she said, her voice cracking. Something inside her broke, it just twisted and broke. ‘You’ve lived
through
this? Through what? This is my life, I’m not living through it, I’m just living it. And there you are, rising above, being good, taking all the hits, playing the martyr. I am tired of feeling like
I
am your penance, Andrew, like I’m the price you had to pay for what you did.’
    She’d never seen him look at her the way he did that night, she never wanted to again.
    They left the next day. They didn’t speak on the journey to the airport and they barely spoke on the plane. The second they touched down in England they started dealing with practicalities, picking up the girls, shopping, Christmas. They never talked about that fight again, they just left everything unresolved. They let life carry on, a new life, a smaller one than they’d led before, darker, with sharper edges.
    But that bug was still there. It lived under her skin, burrowing away, keeping her awake at night. She might always have to live with it, there was nothing she could do about it now. She couldn’t ask him and she couldn’t ask Lilah. Not because Lilah would be angry with her, or because she wouldn’t answer, but because she would. Lilah might tell her the truth, and then what? She couldn’t be angry with her now, she couldn’t hate her. There wasn’t time.
    They arrived at the house around five, the sun still high in a pale blue sky, the heat showing no sign of abating; if anything, it seemed to have intensified. The lawn was parched, faded to a pale yellow. The grey stone walls reflected the light, and from outside the interior of the house looked inky black, cavernous. Who knew what lurked within?
    ‘Is this it?’ Charlotte asked. Natalie, reapplying lipstick, caught a glimpse of her daughter in the sun-visor mirror: her face was set in the same disdainful expression it had worn since the airport. Andrew looked over at her, raised his eyebrows. His expression said I told you so. They shouldn’t have brought the girls.
    They clambered out of the car, stretching legs and arching backs, breathing in the scent of summer. Natalie was hit by a rush of nostalgia for the French house as it once was, as they had known it way back then. It was the smell of the rosemary and lavender, the sound of bells somewhere, the buzz of insects in the flowerbeds. She looked over at Andrew and he was smiling. His smile faltered just a touch as the front door flew open and Dan appeared, beaming and suntanned in board shorts and a T-shirt, his arms thrown open in a gesture of welcome. The genial host, the lord of the manor.
    Natalie had expected Andrew to be delighted about Dan buying the place, but in fact he wasn’t. It made him uneasy, for some reason. When Jen first rang him to tell him that Dan had offered to buy the house, he laughed it off.
    ‘It’ll never happen,’ he said to Nat over dinner. ‘You know what he’s like. When we saw him at Christmas he was talking about the Italian Riviera, remember, or was it Costa de la Luz? And next week it’ll be Croatia, or an island in the Caribbean or something.’ Then when Jen rang and said it was all finalised, contracts exchanged, money in the bank, he was pissed off. ‘He’ll ruin the place,’ he grumbled. ‘There’ll be plasma screens in all the rooms, skylights in the roof. A bloody hot tub. Just you watch.’
    There were no plasma screens in the living room or the kitchen, and no immediate evidence of a hot tub. Dan did seem to have had a speaker system installed, because Natalie noticed that you could hear the strains of Adele wherever you went. It was very tidy and very clean, tidier and cleaner, Nat thought, than when Jen had been staying here. Nat wondered whether he’d got himself a