Page 88 of The Reunion

We carry on cleaning up and after Ashleigh and Ryan leave, I end up helping Bryony to mop up the water in the science block, still cradling this feeling of being able to do something for myself – for this new version of myself, not the one I left behind ten years ago.

Bryony catches my eye, something in my own smile making her brighten, too. I expect her to try and tease me, or needle me about what’s put such a spring in my step, but instead she just lets me be. Giving me breathing space I don’t have to ask for, for once.

‘I think I’ve got an answer for you, by the way,’ Bryony says to me.

‘Hmm?’ I pause, wringing water out of the mop we borrowed from the caretaker’s office. She, meanwhile, winces at the state of the textbooks, about a third of which are unsalvageable from the water damage they sustained.

‘When we were talking, earlier. And I asked you if you were genuinely, really happy, and you asked if I was. I think I’ve got an answer for you now.’

‘Oh?’ I lean on the mop and push my glasses up my nose, waiting patiently. ‘What is it?’

‘Yes.’ She beams and it’s blinding. It’s the most sincere she’s looked all night, and the most like herself, too. ‘I am genuinely, really happy.’

‘Good,’ I say.

Then I duck my head before changing my mind, and instead maintain eye contact with her as I finally offer up a proper answer of my own.

‘I am, too.’

Chapter Forty-Five

Ashleigh

‘Most Likely to Kill Each Other’

The night ends slowly, little by little, pieces of it falling away and being packed up until it ends suddenly and all at once.

One minute, I’m helping Bryony collect up her colourful little box-lights from the floor of the school hall, swapping numbers and blushing and shushing her as she giggles and tries to wheedle out of me all the details about what happened with me and Ryan …

‘I need to know what went down!’ she whispers, none too quietly, cheeks flushed and eyes glittering. ‘Or, at least who went down!’

I cut her a look, but give in to some childish part of me that never got the chance to really do this. I break into a grin and wiggle my eyebrows, then glance at Ryan and pull a face with a small shrug, and Bryony’s squeal is loud enough to make both him and Hayden look over from putting empty plastic drinks bottles into a bin bag.

And then I’m hugging her goodbye and promising Hayden to come visit him and the girls in two weeks but that, yes, I’ll text him when I get back to the hotel safe and we’ll talk more tomorrow, and I’m leaving from the main entrance with Ryan just half a step behind me.

I’m not sure if this means we’re leaving together, or if we just happen to leave at the same time.

Ryan breaks the silence. ‘I reckon she fancies him.’

‘What?’

‘Bryony. Fancies Hayden.’

I laugh, because it’s a laughable concept, but mostly only because of how different they were at school. Still, I’m not wholly convinced there’s any attraction between them as adults.

‘As if,’ I say. ‘There’s no way. They’re just friends, I’m telling you. There’s nothing going on between them.’

Ryan’s face splits into a smug grin, eyebrows twisting almost in sympathy for how wrong he thinks I am. It’s an insufferable look and one I know well, one that makes me want to drag him back inside to spy on Hayden and Bryony and the rest of their clean-up just so I can point out all the ways he’s wrong.

‘I don’t know, they looked pretty pally to me all of a sudden.’

‘They look like two people who got stuck spending time together tonight, and bonded over it a little.’

‘Oh, yeah? And that’s why Hayden’s stayed behind to help clean, is it?’

‘That’s because he’s a nice guy and he can’t help himself. It’s the dad in him. He likes helping people. He’s always doing stuff like that; it’s not because he likes-likes her.’

And, God, did this man really make me say ‘like-like’, like that?

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