The Reunion

talking to herself, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop, and somewhere deep down inside of her, panic was rising.
    She thought it must be the argument they’d had earlier. He was still annoyed by that, and he was probably also tired. He certainly looked exhausted, the circles under his eyes deeper and darker than they had been even of late. She wanted to make things better, for him, for both of them, and so she fell back on what she seemed always to fall back on these days. Placing her hand lightly on his thigh, she said:
    ‘Why don’t we stop somewhere? We can stay in a nasty Travelodge and pretend we’re travelling salespeople having a torrid affair.’ She turned to give him her cheekiest, most enticing little smile, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was staring out of the window. She gave his leg a squeeze. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be fun.’
    ‘Eyes on the road, Lilah,’ he said wearily, still not looking at her.
    ‘Andrew…’
    ‘I just want to go home.’
    They drove on in silence. Lilah could feel the tears rising in her throat, there with the panic, and she wasn’t sure why she felt like this, but she thought that if Andrew kept drumming his fingers on the dashboard like that she was going to smack him.
    ‘What is it? Please, Drew, just tell me what’s going on. Was it a bad weekend with Nat? Was she worse?’
    Silence.
    ‘Andrew…’
    ‘Lilah, just drive, OK? And watch your speed, yeah, you’re doing ninety.’
    Lilah pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator. She watched the speedo go to ninety-five, one hundred, one ten, and she could feel a wobble in the steering wheel, and she pressed her foot down harder still.
    ‘Please, Lilah.’ No more than a whisper. His face was grey. She relaxed her foot off the pedal, changed lanes, into the middle and then the slow lane, then pulled off the motorway at the next exit. Fleet Services.
    In Lilah’s mind, Fleet Services on the M3 would forever live in infamy. They parked in an almost deserted car park and sat for a moment, staring at the dispiritingly cheerful yellow of the McDonald’s arches, the bright, buzzing strip light emanating from the food court.
    ‘I’ll get us some coffee,’ Lilah said. She had her hand on the door handle, but she didn’t actually move. Andrew reached out, and slowly took her other hand in his, squeezing it tight. She squeezed back, and in that moment she knew, not exactly what was coming, but that she and Andrew were finished.
    ‘Do you think,’ she asked very softly, her voice husky with tears, ‘that you’ll ever forgive me, Drew?’
    ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said. It meant nothing, when he said it. They’d all got so tired of hearing those words over the past six months.
    ‘But will you forgive me?’
    That’s when he did it. Andrew, the martyr, falling on his sword and letting her turn her guilt to rage.
    ‘I don’t love you any more, Lilah,’ he said, blunt as a hammer, his voice low and steady. He listened to her start to cry. Then he said: ‘I’ve fallen in love with Natalie.’
    He listened to the catch in her breath, the little gasp of pain. ‘You knew that. Don’t pretend you didn’t know.’
    ‘You feel sorry for her,’ Lilah sobbed. ‘That isn’t love.’
    Andrew waited a long time before replying. Finally, he said: ‘It is love. And the thing I’ve only just realised is that it’s always been her. For me. I’m sorry. I really am.’
    Lilah turned to him. She’d stopped crying; the expression on her face was genuine bewilderment, disbelief. ‘Always? You don’t mean that, Andrew, you can’t. We’ve been together four years, you can’t mean that.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and he got out of the car, and walked into the service station. Lilah sat there for a few minutes, waiting for him to come back, to tell her it was a mistake, he didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true. Then she drove home alone.
    There were lights up ahead, a cluster of lights. They’d reached the village. Andrew spread his fingers out wide on the wheel, stretching and flexing his hands to release the tension.
    ‘Thank God for that,’ he said.
    ‘You never told me,’ Lilah said, ‘how you got home that night? From Fleet.’
    He smiled. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked, and as he did they heard a noise from behind, the car was flooded with light, there was a thump, not vicious, but hard enough to jolt them both forward against their seatbelts. The car shunted