Second Chance - Jane Green [22]
‘Jen!’ she calls out, throwing her coat on the chair in the hallway – something their mother has always hated, and something Olivia and Jen both started doing when they were about ten – except now that Jen is married and a mother herself, she hates it almost as much as their mother. ‘Jen?’
Olivia knows she’s home, her car is in the driveway, so she heads through the hall to the kitchen, planning on rifling through the leftovers in the fridge while her sister makes her a cup of tea, able to do it now that both kids are fast asleep in bed.
As she opens the door of the kitchen, she sees Jen sitting at the kitchen table, and immediately she knows something is wrong. Her sister is just putting down the phone, and she is as white as a sheet.
‘Jen?’ Olivia feels fear grip her chest. ‘Jen? What is it? What’s the matter? Is it Mum?’ There is a touch of hysteria in her voice as it becomes louder.
‘Oh Olivia,’ Jen says, her eyes filled with sadness. ‘That was Elizabeth Gregory, she’s one of my friends from school. She knows… well, her husband knows your friend Tom. I don’t know how to say this. I don’t know how to tell you, but Tom was on that train.’
‘What train? What are you talking about?’
‘He was on the Acela. In America. He didn’t make it.’
‘What do you mean Tom was on the Acela? What are you talking about?’ And then slowly it starts to dawn. ‘Tom? You mean my Tom? He’s dead?’ And without realizing it, Olivia sinks down to the floor, her body trembling like a leaf.
Chapter Four
‘Thank you so much, darling.’ Holly reaches up to give Marcus a kiss on the cheek as he hustles Oliver and Daisy out through the door. ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.’
‘You just remember this at the weekend when I want a lie-in,’ Marcus says. ‘Any message for your mum?’
‘No, just tell her thank you and I’ll call her tomorrow.’
The kids are going to stay at Holly’s mum’s house for the night, and Marcus is going back to the office to work, leaving Holly to get dinner ready for the people she once felt she knew better than anyone else in the world, people she hasn’t seen for years.
Twenty-one years, to be precise. And tonight this is not only their reunion, it is their private memorial service, their chance to support one another, to remember the Tom they all knew and loved. Continue to love.
Saffron has flown in from New York where she was meeting with a film producer. She had been staying at the Soho Grand, had been right there when the train exploded. She, like many other New Yorkers who were instantly transported back to 9/11, had fled the city, thinking that this was just the first of a series of terrorist attacks. She had jumped in a friend’s car heading out to their house in Bedford, crawling along the West Side Highway, shaking the entire journey, all of them stunned that New York was a target yet again.
Olivia had been at home, leafing through the Guardian as the dogs begged for food at her feet, not reading, mindlessly flicking pages as she tried to comprehend the tragedy, when Holly phoned her.
She had barely thought about Holly for years. She’d spoken to her only once since the summer after they all left school, when Olivia went off to Greece for a year and came back deciding to reinvent herself as a grown-up.
They had bumped into each other a year or so after university, and both of them had laughed at how different they were. Olivia’s hair had been waist-length at the time, and Holly’s curly mouse-brown locks had become a sweep of straightened gloss with mahogany lights.
Olivia would have stayed longer to chat, wanted, if not to become friends again, at least to find out more about Holly, but she had just started seeing Andrew, jealous, insecure Andrew, and he had hovered behind Olivia, nodding disdainfully at Holly when introduced, had created an atmosphere so tense that Olivia had allowed herself to be pulled away from Holly at