The Reunion

don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, so it’s necessarily a one-way conversation.

Chapter Fifteen

    JEN CROUCHED OVER the toilet in the downstairs loo and tried to vomit quietly. She would have gone upstairs, only she wasn’t sure that she would have made it, and the sight of her puke dripping glutinously down the stairs would probably have been even less edifying than the sound of her throwing up. In any case, there was only Natalie left to hear her now. Everyone else was gone.
    She finished throwing up and hauled herself to her feet. Her head swam. For a moment, she couldn’t focus properly; she felt as though the ground were moving beneath her feet, rocking side to side. Instinctively, she brought her hand to her belly, placing it on the underside of the bump, for comfort. She stood there, head down, breathing steadily. The dizziness passed. She washed her hands, rinsed her mouth out, splashed water on her face, glanced up at herself in the mirror.
    She looked bloody awful, not so much pale as grey, the colour of Dickensian gruel. The sickness had come over her suddenly: one moment she was listening to Natalie’s horrible, devastating outburst, the next she was in here, heaving her guts out. It couldn’t be morning sickness – she hadn’t had that for weeks. Stress, perhaps. She would put it down to stress.
    She left the bathroom and went out to the living room, where Natalie sat perched on the edge of an armchair, looking out of the window. There wasn’t much to see. The blizzard had hit. It was a white-out. She and Natalie were alone: moments after Andrew had driven off, moments too late, of course, Zac and Dan had scrambled for jackets and outdoor shoes and, still bickering at each other like a pair of old women, gone out into the snow. Dan promised Jen, just as the wave of nausea hit her, that they wouldn’t go further than the wall at the end of the garden.
    Jen doubted they could even find the wall at the end of the garden in this storm. She really wasn’t sure what they imagined they’d achieve by going out there, but she let them go partly because she was feeling too ill to argue and mostly because anything was preferable to listening to them bitching at each other.
    With all the drama and the throwing up, Jen hadn’t really given herself time to think about what Natalie had said. It was only now, with the house empty, silence filling up the spaces left by her departed guests, that she had time to reflect. And the thought that struck her straight away was that it made no difference. It no longer made any difference who was to blame. Conor was dead, Andrew was punished, Natalie had suffered, they had all done their time. Knowing about Lilah’s behaviour changed none of that. It didn’t bring Conor back, it didn’t give Andrew back the life he might have had, it didn’t take away Nat’s pain. All Natalie had achieved was to rip open an old wound, deepen the divisions between them, lessen the chances that they – all of them – might find a future together as friends.
    Jen walked into the living room and stood at Natalie’s side.
    ‘Are you all right?’ she asked her.
    ‘What do you think?’ came Nat’s reply, spoken barely above a whisper. She was leaning forward, her elbows resting on her thighs, head in her hands, furiously rubbing at her forehead with the tips of her fingers. ‘I can’t believe him,’ she kept saying, over and over. ‘I can’t believe him.’
    Jen placed a hand on her shoulder, but Natalie shrugged it away.
    There were a lot of things that Jen wanted to say to her. She wanted to point out that Natalie had done no one any good today. She wanted to express her hurt at what Natalie had said about her before she’d started in on Lilah, that her leaving was meant as punishment for the rest of them, in particular for Andrew. She wanted to say that she thought that, right at this moment, Natalie was behaving like a spoiled, petulant child. Instead, she said: ‘He did what he thought was best. He always does, doesn’t he?’
    Natalie exhaled sharply, half laugh, half sigh. ‘Yes, he does,’ she replied, her tone hard-edged, sarcastic. ‘He does what he thinks is best. And apparently, what was best in this situation was not to support me. What was best was to take Lilah’s side, your side… Jesus. He’s always on your bloody side.’
    Jen took a deep breath, trying with all her might not to let her irritation get the better of her. ‘Hang on,