The Reunion

attempting to step back into the circle of friends, ‘do you ever hear from Maggie at all? Or Ronan?’
    ‘I haven’t spoken to Ronan in a long while, I think he moved to Dubai or something. But Maggie and I are in touch. I’m thinking of actually going over to Ireland once I’ve got everything sorted out here, spending some time with her before the baby’s born.’
    ‘Sorry,’ Zac interrupted, ‘Maggie is?’
    ‘Conor’s mum,’ Jen replied. ‘And Ronan’s his brother.’
    ‘OK. So you must have been very close to the family,’ Zac said, ‘to stay in touch for all this time, I mean.’
    ‘Oh, yes. Very much so. I’ve known them since I was sixteen, so…’ she tailed off, got to her feet and began clearing away the plates. Natalie got to her feet to help. She rinsed the plates and loaded them into the dishwasher while Jen prepared the dessert.
    ‘It was a drunk driver, wasn’t it?’ Zac said as Jen laid a dish of apricot tarte tatin in front of him. ‘That caused the accident I mean.’ Natalie watched two spots of red appear high on Jen’s cheeks; she could feel the colour drain from her own.
    ‘No, no, it wasn’t,’ Jen said, turning away.
    ‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ Zac said, confusion on his face. He turned to Lilah. ‘I thought that’s what you said…’
    ‘Let’s drop it, shall we?’ Lilah said, her voice low.
    Natalie sat back down at the table, her eyes on Lilah’s face.
    ‘You told him Conor was killed by a drunk driver?’ she asked.
    ‘No, I didn’t, I said that…’
    ‘Well, he was,’ Andrew piped up. He looked Zac directly in the eye. ‘It was me. I was driving. I
was
over the limit. There was an accident. Conor was killed.’ His voice was steady and even.
    ‘Oh, Christ, I’m sorry…’
    ‘It wasn’t Andrew’s fault,’ Jen said. ‘He wasn’t over the limit. They did a blood test. He wasn’t over the limit. It was just an accident.’
    ‘It was my fault, Jen, we all know that. The blood test was hours later,’ Andrew said softly, giving her a small, sad smile, and Natalie felt a sob bubble up in her throat. She hated this, hated seeing him take everything on his shoulders.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Zac said. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’
    ‘No,’ Dan said quietly. ‘You probably shouldn’t have.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ Andrew said. ‘It was a long time ago. We’ve all dealt with it in our own ways, haven’t we?’
    He tried to smile at Natalie, but she could sense the effort it took, to hold his head up, his shoulders back. He looked so exhausted. Her heart contracted. Sometimes, especially when she was away from the girls, or when the pain was very bad, or when she sat at her desk on a Sunday, watching Andrew dutifully washing their crappy old car in their crappy old driveway on their crappy old street, she felt as though her heart were getting smaller and smaller, beat by beat. Then something would happen: Grace would play her a new piece on the violin, Charlotte would tell her something hilarious that happened at school, Andrew would smile at her in his old, secret way, and whoosh! It just expanded again, it filled up, her heart, and she felt whole.
    Now, she felt it get smaller and smaller, and she listened as Jen steered the conversation elsewhere, away from dangerous ground; she listened to Lilah’s brittle laughter at something Dan said and she was overwhelmed by anger. A righteous anger. Sitting there at that table, her fingernails digging into her palms, she had a sudden, irresistible urge to tell the truth. Not history rewritten, not the past through rose-tinted spectacles, not the sanitised version of the story they’d all been telling themselves for years and years, but the truth she’d been carrying around all this time, a secret, with all its potency.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ Natalie said, loud and abrupt, interrupting Dan who was telling everyone a story about shooting a film in Australia, ‘that we have all dealt with it. Not very well, anyway.’
    ‘Nat, let’s just leave it now,’ Andrew said.
    ‘I don’t want to leave it.’
    ‘Please, Natalie…’ Jen said, imploring.
    ‘No, Jen, I’m sorry, but I’m just not prepared to leave it at that. I’m not prepared to allow Lilah to tell her boyfriend that Conor was killed by a drunk driver…’
    ‘That isn’t what I told him,’ Lilah snapped.
    ‘So what did you tell him? Did you tell him about the race? Did you mention that Dan in his flash new car was so