The Reunion by Amy Silver

Andrew asked.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Jen said, a small, shy smile on her lips. ‘Did I not mention? I’m pregnant.’

 
     
    14 May 1995
    J
    I’ve been thinking about LAF (Life After Finals), and this is what I think we should do:
    Leave college (obviously).
Move to the Big Smoke, earn a bit of cash.
Move in together.
Go to Asia for a bit. Thailand, Vietnam, you know the sort of thing. Teach English, take hallucinogenics.
Come back to the UK, earn a bit more cash.
Get married.
Move to the French house. I will make beautiful pieces of furniture in the barn. You will translate great works of literature into French.
Have lots of babies.
    What d’ya think?
    Love you.
    C
    P.S. Enjoy
The German Ideology.
Looks deathly if you ask me.

Chapter Eight

    OUTSIDE, IN THE converted barn, Dan sat on the bed on the mezzanine, his head bowed. He rang Claudia’s number. It went to voicemail. He wondered whether she had spoken to her husband yet, whether she was speaking to him right now. He imagined them in the middle of a screaming match, tears running down her perfectly angled cheekbones, along the sharp line of her jaw, down her neck. In his head, she looked impossibly beautiful even in the most arduous of circumstances, including the act of leaving her husband. Dan had never actually met the husband, he hadn’t come to the set. Dan hoped he didn’t have too fiery a temper. He doubted it – the guy was a director of some charitable foundation. Plus, he was German, which meant that by rights he should have ice in his veins. Still, you never could tell. He rang Claudia’s number again, listened to her voice, low and throaty, as she told him, first in German and then in English, that he should leave a message. He didn’t.
    He opened his suitcase and finished the unpacking he’d half-heartedly begun the night before. His suits were already hanging in the closet. He’d brought the good ones, the Paul Smith and the Richard James (he liked to wear English tailoring, none of this Gucci or D&G nonsense). That was as far as he’d got, however, what with the beer and the wine and dinner and Lilah and Natalie. His shirts lay crumpled in his bag.
    He clambered down the ladder to the main part of the apartment. He hung his 100 per cent lambskin APC bomber jacket over the back of the desk chair in the corner of the room and set about unpacking his toiletries in the wet room, lining them up carefully on the shelf: Marc Jacobs eau de toilette, REN Glycolactic Radiance Renewal Mask, Lab Series Restorative Shampoo, Kerastase conditioner, Gilette Fusion ProGlide Styler.
    He left his running gear and trainers in the bag; it was unlikely he was going to be able to get out this weekend, not in this weather. Usually, he liked to keep to a five-mile-per-day, five-days-a-week minimum. In the business he was in, ridiculous though it seemed, looks mattered, even if you were only behind the camera. So he took care of himself, he moisturised, he exercised. And he knew, even though no one had ever said as much, that he looked better than he had in his twenties. He’d been so slight then, so insubstantial. His frame was still narrow, but he had meat on his bones now, sinewy and hard. His dark hair was greying, but he preferred it like that, it suited him, bestowing upon him a gravitas which his face, pale and youthful and lightly freckled, had always denied him.
    He heard a door slam outside, laughter. Lilah and her himbo walking hand in hand in the snow towards the woodshed. Dan wondered what, apart from the obvious, she saw in him. And he wondered what the others would have thought of Claudia. The girls would have been jealous, she was so young, so beautiful. But would they have liked her? He wasn’t entirely sure. She was brilliant and talented, passionate and eccentric, but she wasn’t particularly warm. She was a man’s woman. He reached for his phone again, rang Claudia again, listened to the voicemail again.
    He stood at the French windows and gazed