The Reunion

what was up. They re-emerged a little while later.
    ‘She fainted,’ Conor told him. ‘Just clean away, apparently, she hit her head. She’s lying down now. She’ll be all right. I think it’s just heat and booze and not having anything to eat. She’s been feeling a little under the weather the last week or two.’ Dan must have looked upset because Conor smiled and clapped him on the arm. ‘She’s all right, mate. She’ll be out in a minute. We’ll just leave her to rest for a bit.’
    Dan waited for a few minutes, until Conor was once again busying himself with the barbecue, until Andrew and Natalie were once again deep in conversation. He slipped into the house, down the corridor and into Andrew and Lilah’s bedroom. He knocked softly and pushed open the door. The room was dark, curtains drawn. She was lying on her side, her back towards him.
    ‘You OK, Jen?’ he asked her, and she rolled over to look at him. She didn’t say anything. He approached the bed, slowly, his breathing shallow. Her eyes were on his face; she smiled, but there were tears on her cheeks. He sat down at her side, leaned over her and kissed her.
    ‘Don’t,’ she said. He couldn’t help himself, he had to touch her, to feel her skin beneath his fingertips again. He put his hand on her waist, all the time keeping his eyes on hers, but she shook her head.
    ‘Don’t,’ she said again. She said his name. ‘Dan, don’t.’ He wanted to say something, he needed to tell her that he loved her. He hesitated for a moment, he was trying to find the words, it was so stupid, it was the simplest thing in the world, to tell her how he felt. She turned away from him, rolling back onto her side. She asked him to leave, and he did.
    He bumped into Conor outside in the hallway.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Conor asked him.
    ‘I just wanted to see, you know, if she was all right.’
    Conor was standing in front of him, barely a foot away from him, blocking his path.
    ‘I told you to leave her to rest,’ he said.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Dan said, and he hated himself in that moment, for lowering his eyes, for submitting.
    Conor took a deep breath, exhaled. ‘Yeah, no. I know. Me too, sorry. Feeling a bit tense, you know. I’m worried about her.’
    ‘Of course,’ Dan said, and he looked up at him and smiled. Conor smiled back, but his eyes were searching Dan’s face; he was looking for something. ‘You go on in and take care of her,’ Dan said and the smile slipped from Conor’s face.
    ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’
    Dan and Lilah got drunk that night, drunk and loud – they were out there dancing in the back garden long after the others had called it a night. He couldn’t remember, when he woke up the next morning, exactly how the evening had ended. He didn’t recall saying goodbye to Conor, couldn’t recall seeing Jen at all after he’d been into the bedroom and kissed her. He remembered Lilah telling him something, a secret, something he absolutely must not tell the others. He couldn’t anyway, because he couldn’t remember what the secret was.

Chapter Thirty-nine

    JEN WENT TO the doctor on Monday, three days after the fainting incident. It wasn’t her usual doctor, it was a private place in a smart townhouse near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where they asked her questions and gave her a form to fill in. They debited her card to the tune of £390 and handed her a box containing four pills, two to take straight away, two to take twelve hours later. It started in the middle of the night. She left Conor sleeping, took a blanket and sat on the loo while the baby bled out of her.
    She’d expected to feel something, she’d expected to cry, to feel bereft, but instead she was oddly numb. It was as though she had nothing left to feel; she was spent, finished, the past six weeks had taken everything out of her.
    The night she spent with Dan seemed so very far away now – that night, and the day afterwards and the day after that, when she’d tried to picture what the world would look like if she left Conor for one of his closest friends. When she pictured her life like that, it was a bleak place, one where Conor was left angry and heartbroken, where her friends shunned her, where a relationship with Dan would pretty much be ruined before it started because everything they felt for each other would be tainted with guilt. She wrote letters to Conor and to Dan, she ripped them up. She thought of how the conversation would