The Reunion

nights and the drinking and the bad diet. It had to be.
    And that’s what she told herself, all that afternoon, and as she tried to fall asleep in Conor’s arms that night; she told herself that on the tube on the way to work next morning, she kept repeating it to herself as she tried to concentrate on her work. She went to the loo about 500 times, just to check it hadn’t started. It hadn’t. By the time she left the office she could stand it no longer. She stopped by Boots on the way home and bought two boxes of pregnancy tests. She completed all four tests once she got home. She sat on the floor of the bathroom, staring at the crosses on the pee-sticks and trying to cry herself out before Conor got home.
    And now here she was, a few weeks later, sitting in the bathroom again, not crying this time, not desperate, not panicking, just numb. Baby gone.
    Things were not going to go back to normal. She knew that when she saw Dan at the barbecue, when she saw the flash of anger in his face, felt the sting of jealousy when he talked about other girls, when she endured that desperate moment when he came to her in a darkened bedroom. She didn’t know how long it would take, six months or a year, or forever, but she knew that for her and Dan, normal was not a realistic prospect for the immediate future.
    She had to let that go to focus on the one thing that was left to her, which was to make it up to Conor. She would never tell him because he would not believe that it was acceptable to get rid of a child. Instead, she swore to herself, that night, in the bathroom, after the baby had bled out of her, that she would spend the rest of her life making him as happy as she possibly could. He would never know what might have been, and she would carry this awful, wretched guilt. She would find a way to atone for it.

Chapter Forty

    ON THE MORNING of 21 June, Dan awoke with a shocking hangover, the kind that makes it difficult to move. He couldn’t move much anyway, because there was a girl lying on his arm. She had mousy dark hair and a chubby face, a little mascara smeared over her cheekbones. She was nice, they’d had a good time. He was buggered if he could remember her name, though.
    He lifted his head off the pillow (pain, nausea), propping himself up on his left elbow, his right arm still trapped under the girl. He didn’t recognise the room he was in, they must be at her place. He had no idea where it was. He could remember leaving the club, getting into a taxi, he could remember arriving at a block of flats, tripping on the stairs, but he had zero recollection of what happened in the interim.
    Gingerly, he tried to withdraw his arm without waking the girl. As he pulled, she rolled away from him. Mercifully, she didn’t wake. He swung his legs over the end of the bed, squinting into the sunlight (terrible pain, overwhelming nausea). The girl stirred a little, she made an odd sort of chewing noise, but still her eyes remained closed. As carefully and quietly as he could, he retrieved his clothes from the bedroom floor and crept, naked, out into the hallway. There was a bathroom just opposite. He padded across the hall, slipped into the bathroom, locked the door behind him and threw up.
    He got dressed, splashed his face with water, ate a dollop of toothpaste and crept back into the hallway. He hesitated there for a moment. The front door was right in front of him, he could slip away unnoticed. She might even appreciate it, she probably didn’t want to have the awkward morning-after-the-night-before conversation either. That’s what he told himself as he walked down the road outside her flat, the throbbing in his head exacerbated by every step.
    The chubby girl from last night was the ninth since Jen. Ninth or tenth. Who’s counting? He knew a guy, one of the blokes they’d been at college with, who kept a notebook next to his bed. He wrote down their names, if he could remember them, or their notable attributes if he couldn’t. He gave them scores out of ten. Pathetic. Dan wasn’t going down that route. He was just getting it out of his system. Getting
her
out of his system. And in fact, after the initial booze and girls binging of late March and early April, he’d been a bit better in recent weeks. It was just seeing her again that had set him back.
    All the good work, the staying away, the telling himself that there could never be anything between them, that there wasn’t anything between them, was undone,