The Reunion

that night, when we lay down on the mattress in the back room, we were sore, bellies aching from laughing so much? (Have I told you, by the way, that you’ve the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard?)
    That was the best of days, wasn’t it? Nothing really happened, nothing special. We just ate and drank and danced and laughed and I’ve never felt happier.
    I played that day over in my head, last night, and when I woke up this morning my head was full of you. I don’t want ever to forget what we were like that day, the way we felt, you and me and all of us. We should hold on to that. I’m told it doesn’t always last.
    Ma sends love.
    Can’t wait to see you pretty girl, I ache for you.
    All my love, always,
    Conor

Part One

Chapter One

    December 2012
    AS SHE CLIMBED the stairs for what seemed like the fourteenth time that afternoon, Jen noticed a drop of blood on one of the stone steps. She made a mental note to clean it up. Later. After she’d finished getting the bedrooms ready, after she’d checked the bathrooms were spotless, after she’d straightened the bedspreads and dusted the sills, after she’d made sure there was dry firewood in the kitchen and the living room, after she’d placed flowers in vases. White tea roses for Andrew and Natalie, blood-red orchids for Lilah. She’d driven all the way to a posh florist in Draguignan to buy them, close to a two-hour drive there and back. Ridiculous, really, but it had seemed important that morning. To make the place feel welcoming. She hadn’t been sure what to buy for Dan: peonies seemed too feminine, lilies funereal, carnations too cheap. In the end she bought a little pot of black velvet petunias which she placed on the desk below the window, the one looking up to the thicket of trees behind the house, and to the mountain beyond.
    After buying the flowers, she’d ended up spending more than 300 euros, buying brightly coloured throws for the beds and the sofa downstairs, scatter cushions covered with vibrant African prints, an oxblood rug for the living room. It was beyond stupid, she’d only have to pack it all up in a couple of weeks’ time. And do what with it? She wasn’t even sure where she was going. And now, placing the roses on the chest in the second bedroom, the one she’d given to Andrew and Natalie, she wondered if it might all be for nothing. She stood at the window looking out across the valley and shivered; it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the light was almost gone, threatening charcoal-grey clouds moving inexorably towards her. She’d had the radio on downstairs; the forecast had changed. The bad weather they had been predicting for the middle of the following week had been brought forward, to the weekend, but looking at the sky now even that seemed optimistic. It seemed as though the storm were almost upon her. Snow lay thick on the ground from the last heavy fall, a couple of days previously, but for now the roads were clear. If the storm came early, if the snow fell too soon, the road would be blocked and her guests would never get there.
    Flowers done, she went into the bathroom, soaked a cloth and cleaned the blood from the stairs. She’d cut her finger French-trimming the rack of lamb for dinner. A banal enough explanation, but for some reason the action of wiping away blood seemed to herald something sinister. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and out of the corner of her eye she seemed to catch movement in the half-light of the house; she felt afraid. She went downstairs and stoked up the fire in the living room, she turned on all the lights.
    Even with the lights on, the fire lit, the bright new throws and the cushions, despite all her attempts to make the house feel lived in, it felt cold, empty. Before she’d arrived, two months prior, it had been unoccupied for over a year and it hadn’t lost its sense of abandonment. That took time, she imagined, and people, and possessions. She’d brought very little from Paris: clothes and books and kitchenware, a laptop and the radio, not much else. The rest was all still there, packed up in boxes marked with her name, awaiting a destination.
    It wasn’t just the loneliness, though, it was the season. The wind fairly screamed up the valley, whipping through the place, whistling through gaps under doors, rattling against the old leaded windows. This was the first time Jen had ever come here in winter, and she found herself wandering around with a blanket