The Reunion

taking notes. I’m a writer, Lilah. We use things from life, all artists do. Once again, I’m sorry if I offended you (is that a better sentence construction?). It wasn’t my intention, and I have to say that I’m pretty upset that all you saw in the film was a slight against you. There was a bit more to it than that, I hoped.
    Lilah to Dan
    Sod off you pretentious wanker.

Chapter Twenty-three

    ANDREW HAD FORGOTTEN how loudly Lilah snored. It was extraordinary how such a delicate creature, so fine-featured and small-boned, could produce quite so much noise, quite so much grunting and snorting, in her sleep. He remembered now that the reason for his lack of sleep between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three was not solely Lilah’s voracious sexual appetite but her terrible sinus issues.
    He slipped out of bed and walked to the window. The snow had almost stopped. It lay thick on the road, almost perfect, untouched save for a sole trail of tiny prints, weaving this way and that – a drunken fox, perhaps? The branches of the trees opposite sank almost to the ground under the weight of snow and, just outside the window, icicles, some three or four feet long, hung from the eaves, gleaming silver in reflected moonlight. He thought he might take some pictures to show the girls. Quietly, he crept over to the bed and retrieved his phone from the bedside table.
    He’d turned it off to save battery and on turning it back on he discovered, with a start, that the signal had returned. The phone beeped at him, angrily and repeatedly, alerting him to missed calls and text messages. He tried to muffle its sound under the blanket he had wrapped around his body, although it didn’t actually matter: Lilah wouldn’t have been woken by a bomb going off. She could sleep through anything.
    There were twenty-four missed calls, mostly from Jen’s landline, and a number of text messages, mostly from Natalie. As he flicked through them, he noticed a clear trajectory in tone, from frightened (
r u ok, call me
) to panicky (
Where r u? V worried pls call asap
), before a sudden hairpin bend towards jealous rage, and finally, a long slow drift into incomprehensibility (
u aasvard dont cmmd cabk
).
    There were also three messages from his daughters, one from Grace telling him she’d had an ‘epic’ time at Longleat Safari Park (still so easily entertained, Grace; she hadn’t quite tipped over into teenager-hood yet) and one from Charlotte asking if he could persuade Natalie to let them go to Sonja’s party on New Year’s Eve. Charlotte most definitely was a teenager, and had already developed the technique of waging extended divide-and-rule campaigns in order to get whatever it was she wanted. Andrew was seen as the weaker of the parents so he was always the first point of attack. The third text, also from Charlotte, was a picture of the two of them, grinning happily in the front room of their grandparents’ house, with a ‘
love you Dad xxxxx
’ message attached. This sent a few minutes before the New Year’s Eve party request, to soften him up. Nobody’s fool, that girl, just like her mother.
    He took some pictures of the snowy scene outside, his heart swollen: beauty and love, what more could you wish for? His friends (even Natalie, it now seemed), looked at his life and felt sorry for him, but the thing no one seemed to realise about him was that, of all of them, he counted himself the luckiest. He got what he wanted, he got the woman he loved, and two beautiful daughters into the bargain. He longed to see them now, his arms ached for them.
    He shivered. He felt a nameless fear, dread, rising up in him. He could tell himself a thousand times that it would be OK, because although Natalie would be angry with him tomorrow (today), and the day after that and possibly a few days more, they would be OK, once the anger burned out. Once his own anger burned out. Things would go back to normal once the guilt was crushed down, shrugged off, ignored. They would be OK. Wouldn’t they? After all they had been through together, they could get through this. And yet, he felt afraid. He typed a message to Nat.
Hope this doesn’t wake you up, just wanted to tell you how much I love you. Always, A.
    He turned back from the window, smiling despite himself at the girl in the bed, arms and legs everywhere, a beautiful broken doll. He crawled back into bed, trying his best not to disturb her, trying to find some corner of the bed where he