Read Online Reunion by Andrea Goldsmith - Free Book Online Page A

other than the players themselves knew about her month with Jack or her affair with Connie? As for Fleur, Jack knew, and of course Harry, who believed that as long as Ava remained with him she was choosing him above Fleur. And while she would never leave Harry, sometimes you choose but are not chosen in return.
    Old secrets gradually lose their radioactivity, acquiring instead a certain nostalgia. Secrets left behind after your life has moved forward become safe. Fleur, so recently full of hard heat, was finally cooling.
    As for the often squalid side to secrets, Ava had never regarded hers in this way. What both Stephen and Fleur had given her was valuable, and so much of what you value is never put on show. As she walked the grounds of her old university, this place that filled a special part of her past, it occurred to her that memories can become secrets too, sometimes so deeply buried that barely a whisper remains. But at the most unexpected of times they emerge, lovely and lively, returning you to times no longer lost.
    The wind had dropped and as she left the arts building and made her way to the library she felt the first spatter of rain. And what, she wondered, might she not know about her old friends? Helen’s ambitions, for example, and this predicament of hers with science, her longest love. And Jack’s achievements, surelythere were more than he had revealed to her. And Connie, how did he square his moral philosopher’s stance with three marriages, a swathe of children and numerous lovers? Only Harry was in the clear, Harry who slept with his bedroom door ajar, who worked always with the door to his office open, her Harry had no secrets.

C HAPTER 2: The Buried Life
    1.
    It was the evening after the reunion and in a building by the river, in a huge white space with soaring ceilings and a colossal wall of glass, Harry Guerin was working through his final check-list. He had selected this venue for the NOGA cocktail party confident that the three to four hundred people required to fill the area would make the effort to attend. A few guests had already arrived and were idling self-consciously in the no-man’s-land of a room before a party. Harry glanced at his watch, not yet six, and certainly too soon to worry his hopes might have muddied his expectations. He rustled up a waiter to give the early arrivals a drink, then slipped into the kitchen for last-minute instructions to the catering staff. Back in the bar area, he inspected the waiters; he insisted one fellow restrain his dreadlocks and another remove a line of eyebrow studs, and, to quell the murmurings, promised a ten per cent cash bonus for the lot of them. Money, he had learned long ago, was a reliable pacifier.
    He was about to do a final check with the sound and light people when he saw Helen arrive. She might well be in line fora Nobel, but it didn’t take much nous to realise that if improving the lot of the starving multitudes was a widespread priority, the starving would not amount to multitudes. Unlike Helen he was a realist, and his job would be a great deal easier if she were too.
    He shoved his list in his pocket and followed her out to the terrace where she had already lit up. Too busy to be anything but blunt, he told her this was not the time for a crisis of conscience; she knew exactly where her expertise lay, and so, for that matter, did NOGA.
    â€˜Many people have invested in you and your science,’ he said. ‘You owe it to them, yourself as well, to be sensible.’
    The smile she had raised to greet him slid from her face, but before she could find an answer he had turned and headed back inside. And while he would have preferred a more diplomatic approach, given the pressures on him tonight, pussy-footing around the issue was not an option, nor, he suspected, would it produce results.
    A few more people had wandered in but not nearly enough for reassurance. Assuming a confidence he did not feel, he marched