The Reunion

often – the girls would do or say something funny and I’d imagine how much you’d laugh if you’d seen it or heard it.
    You are and were always a part of us all, integral just like any one of us, and I realise that to say otherwise was very hurtful of me. So, before I ask you if I can bring my entire family to stay at your house (your house! I can hardly believe it!), I must ask your forgiveness first.
    Take care of Lilah for me, for all of us.
    Love,
    Natalie

Chapter Forty-six

    THEY WERE LYING in the hammock, Jen and Lilah with Isabelle tucked up neatly in between them. Late afternoon, the sun just starting its slide down behind the mountain, the shadows long. Isabelle and Lilah were sleeping, the baby’s breathing light and steady, Lilah’s ragged, whistling, wheezing. Jen lay propped up on a pillow, her book on her lap. She wasn’t actually reading, she was content just to watch them.
    The hammock was enormous, bright red and brand new, bought by Dan as a gift for Lilah. It hung between the oaks on the north side of the house, the perfect place to shelter from the heat of the afternoon, shaded by the trees and catching the best of the cool breeze blowing in from the coast. Since they’d arrived a week before, Jen and Isabelle had taken to joining Lilah in her hammock; they spent the afternoons there, sleeping or talking or watching the baby sleep. Some days the cat joined them; it climbed into the oak tree and looked down on them from on high.
    Lilah was in love with Isabelle, she couldn’t get enough of her. She reached for her at every opportunity, she was constantly slipping her skeletal fingers into Isabelle’s chubby ones, or grabbing at her fat little toes, tracing circles on the baby’s perfect porcelain skin with her fingertips. Jen couldn’t believe it, Lilah was pretty much the least child-friendly person she’d ever met.
    ‘I like babies,’ Lilah informed her. ‘Babies are easy, provided they’re not your own. They just sleep, and you cuddle them. You don’t have to think of clever things to say to entertain them, or play endless games. They’re like puppies, really.’ She got on very well with Charlotte and Grace, too, which Natalie said was because she still had the mind of a teenage girl, always had.
    Natalie and Andrew scurried around the house like servants, rarely if ever stopping to relax. They seemed curiously detached from each other, focused almost entirely on their children and Lilah. Natalie had assumed the role of nurse; she quietly and efficiently stripped beds and brought food and administered medicine, then she would disappear into the kitchen to prepare more food or put on the washing. Andrew was constantly fixing things, replacing door knobs and oiling hinges, driving Dan to distraction.
    ‘It’s my bloody house,’ he kept muttering, which made Jen smile, because it wasn’t really, it was never going to be his house, it belonged to all of them.
    Jen was too exhausted to be properly helpful, instead she and Isabelle became Lilah’s constant companions, going for very slow, very short walks in the mornings, lounging in the hammock in the afternoons, occasionally taking brief excursions to the village to visit Monsieur and Madame Caron at the B&B and to have café and pains au chocolat at the pâtisserie in the square.
    Lilah stirred, she stretched one arm up lazily, she opened her eyes.
    ‘There you are,’ she said, smiling at Jen. ‘We were wondering where you’d got to.’
    ‘Were you?’ Jen asked. She reached out and touched Lilah’s wispy hair.
    ‘We were looking for you everywhere.’ Lilah was often like this when she woke, confusing dreams with reality. ‘Conor said you’d gone to the village to get food for the party, but I told him you did that yesterday.’
    ‘Conor?’
    ‘Yes. He’s in the woods. We were walking in the woods.’
    ‘Oh. OK.’ Jen bit down hard on her lip and lay back so that Lilah wouldn’t see her welling up.
    They tried, as far as they could, not to go to pieces in her presence, but it wasn’t always easy. The confusion was to be expected. Severe headaches, nausea, memory loss, speech difficulties, loss of appetite, all to be expected. Jen had read up on the subject. They didn’t know how long it would be, but the tumour was very aggressive. For now, her pain could be managed at home, but eventually she would have to go to a hospice. They talked about that in whispers so as not to enrage her.
    ‘Don’t