The Reunion

that he was in a better state to drive than the person who’d told everyone she’d stay sober.’
    The tears were sliding freely down Lilah’s face now; her shoulders slumped. Natalie wasn’t ready to stop yet.
    ‘I would have said something about it at the hearing, obviously, had I remembered. I didn’t though, because of the memory loss after the accident. Post-traumatic stress or retrograde amnesia, they said. There was a lot I couldn’t remember about that day. It was years later that it came to me, the truth. After the girls were born, after we were married. At first I thought I must have mis-remembered, that it was something I’d dreamt up in my imagination, because she wouldn’t do that, would she? Surely not even at her most selfish could Lilah do that?’
    Andrew got to his feet, walked across to them and took Lilah’s arm. He was at Lilah’s side. ‘Please, Nat. That’s enough. Please just stop now.’
    He was at Lilah’s side. On Lilah’s side. On Jen’s side. Why wasn’t he on her side? Why was he never on her side? She was always on his side, Jesus Christ, she was doing this, saying all these things, to make them see who was really responsible. To make them understand that Andrew shouldn’t have borne all that guilt. It was too much. She shook her head, her eyes never leaving Lilah’s face.
    ‘Do you ever think about what might have happened if you hadn’t got drunk that day? If you hadn’t got wasted, if, just for once in your miserable life you’d done as you said you would, if you’d thought of someone else rather than yourself? Do you ask yourself whether, maybe, just maybe, if you had done that, Conor would be sitting at the table there, with Jen? Maybe Andrew would have had the life he deserved?’
    Lilah’s face started to crumple, her shoulders hunched. She reached for the kitchen counter to steady herself, gripping it hard, her knuckles white. ‘He’d be a QC by now, not just a teacher in some fucking sink school, and Jen wouldn’t be here alone, and I wouldn’t have had to live every single day of the last sixteen years in pain. I wouldn’t be a fucking cripple.’

 
     
    Friday 19 March 1999
    Dear Lilah,
    I’m sending this care of your mum. I’m not sure where you are at the moment. I hope that wherever you are, this finds you happy and well.
    I know how angry you are with me, I know you feel that I betrayed you, betrayed our friendship. I did. There’s no excuse for that, other than love. I love him with everything I am. I always will. I feel as though we are meant for each other. You may laugh at that, you may dismiss it. It’s how I feel, Lilah.
    It’s not enough, I know it isn’t, nothing I can say will ever take the sting out of what I did. The only thing I can hope for, and oh God, I hope for it fervently, is that you have found someone who loves you so much and makes you so happy that you can forgive me anyway.
    I don’t only want that for myself, I want it for you, of course, and I want it for him. He’s had so much to struggle with the past few years, he carries so much guilt with him. If you could find it in yourself to forgive him, I can’t tell you what it would mean.
    You may be angry with me, angrier still for reminding you, but none of us is faultless in this, Lilah. Perhaps mine was the greatest fault, but you must remember that you were, you once told me, ‘all but done with him’.
    I will never be done with him, and I desperately hope he feels the same about me. We’re getting married. It’s just a registry office job, in Reading on 27 July. Please come. I want so much for you to be there. I miss you, Lilo.
    With love,
    Nat

Chapter Twelve

    THERE WAS A part of him, a terrible, shameful part of him, which sat there breathless, like a member of an enraptured audience. Dan listened to Natalie spit out her venom, watched Lilah break down, making the journey from drunken, defiant bravado through to virtual collapse; he marvelled at how perfect the lighting was from where he was sitting, the two protagonists back-lit by the snow-white light from outside, the orange glow from the wood burner adding a touch of warmth to the scene. He admired the staging, the group sitting around that solid table in a cosy kitchen interior in the foreground, contrasting perfectly with the chilling, stormy exterior, the white-out behind.
    The worst of the scene (the best of it?) was over, ending with Natalie’s final, bitter accusation and then her exit,