The Reunion

everything I did wrong and all the pain I caused.
    I wish you lots of love, I hope that you are happy.
    Goodbye for now.
    Lilah x

Chapter Twenty

    JEN MOVED THROUGH the house slowly, trailing her fingers along the smooth, cool surface of the plastered walls upstairs, across the rough stone on the side of the stairway. She placed candles in every room. The storm was starting to die down a little, the creaking of the beams in the roof had lessened, the snowfall had slowed. Inside the house, it felt as though they were at the eye of the storm; there was an atmosphere of strange, tense quietude. Natalie sat at the kitchen table, fuming. Zac was working quietly, wrapping jacket potatoes in foil to cook in the wood burner, in case anyone was hungry later. Dan sat in the living room with a glass of wine. He was troubled by something, that had been obvious from the moment he came down from the attic. Jen wondered if it was because of his girlfriend.
    ‘You OK?’ she asked Dan as she took the armchair opposite his. He looked up and smiled at her, a very sad smile, an old smile. One she remembered. ‘What happened? Is it Claudia?’
    He shook his head. ‘No, no. It’s nothing. It’s… nothing.’
    It obviously wasn’t nothing. ‘Well, it looks like it’s something. Come on. You can talk to me.’
    He raised his eyebrows a little, looking directly at her. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said.
    Jen lowered her eyes. ‘You think it too, do you? Like Natalie, you think I was punishing you?
    ‘No, I don’t. I don’t think that. I wish…’ he tailed off.
    ‘Is that what’s troubling you? I know something’s troubling you. It isn’t the banging sound, is it?’ She smiled at him. ‘Because I think that might be the woodshed door. I might have forgotten to close it.’
    ‘It’s not the banging sound either. Although good to know that it’s just the woodshed. That’s a relief.’
    ‘
She said, there’s something nasty in the woodshed
. . .’ They sang it together and started laughing.
    The fire crackled and spat; a fat spark flew clear of the hearth and on to the rug. Dan fell to his knees to smother it. He found himself at Jen’s feet. He put his hands around her ankles.
    ‘I missed you,’ he said quietly. She reached forward, running her fingers through his cropped hair.
    ‘You too.’
    ‘I wish you’d written.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I found something,’ he said. He was still kneeling at her feet, his head bowed.
    ‘Found something?’
    ‘Upstairs, in the attic. In one of the boxes.’ He delved into the front pocket of his jeans, brought out a much-folded sheet of paper and handed it to her.
    ‘Oh.’ Her hand came up to her mouth. ‘Oh my God. The list. Your list. It was in the attic?’
    Dan looked up at her. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I should show you…’
    ‘Oh, yes. Of course you should.’ She leaned forward and put her arms around his neck, gave him a squeeze, inhaled the scent of him. He smelled expensive, like leather. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’ She read it and reread it, a smile on her lips. ‘We were so hopeful, weren’t we? God. So young.’ Her laughter bubbled up in her throat. ‘It was… a couple of nights before we left, wasn’t it?’ Dan nodded. ‘You were sitting just about exactly where you are now. Con and I were on that old sofa that was here, over by the wall. You decided that we had to note down our ambitions, for posterity. You were always writing things down for posterity, weren’t you?’
    ‘I always thought it might end up good material.’ He flinched as the words came out. ‘I didn’t mean…’
    ‘I know what you meant.’
    ‘I wonder how this ended up in the attic?’
    ‘No idea. I remember looking for it when I got back to England. It wasn’t in my notebook. I remember thinking that I’d have to rewrite it sometime, if I could remember it all. Somehow it must have got mixed in with the tenant’s stuff.’ Jen reread the list, blinking back the tears pricking the backs of her eyes.
    ‘God. You lot were so ambitious! All Conor and I seemed to want was an easy life…’
    ‘Well,’ Dan got to his feet and took his place in the armchair opposite her. ‘You didn’t need ambition. You already had pretty much everything you wanted.’
    She couldn’t meet his eyes then. ‘But get you lot – Booker Prize, human rights advocate, Sundance festival. Actually, you’ve not done all that badly. I mean, Claudia may not be Winona Ryder, but at