AI "Laila."
The gin kissed my knuckles as the bottle knocked the lip of the glass. I steadied it, set the drink under the skiff of lime, and looked up.
She had shaved her hair to a buzz that caught the light like wet slate. A fitted charcoal suit, lean lines where there had been denim and badges, a throat unmarked by the thrift-store pendants she used to hoard. Same eyes though, green with that fleck of amber in the left one, as if a match had once struck there and gone out badly.
"That is not my name," I said.
"It used to be." The corner of her mouth moved, not a smile. "Aurora then. Rory. Will you serve me or do we stage an opera for the tourists?"
Silas slid two coasters down the bar with the easy flick of someone who had once flicked knives. His signet ring caught the low light. He did not say hello. He looked at me as if I already knew my part.
"She pays, she drinks," he said.
"I always do." She put down a card I recognised. Not the bank, the tiny chip in the lower left where she used to pry open hard drives. She had traded the chipped purple varnish for neat clear nails.
"What will it be," I said.
"Blackthorn gin if you stock it. Neat. And water. Ungassed."
"Not cider," I said. "Not you."
"People change."
"Sometimes they do not."
Her throat worked once when the gin hit it. That part had not changed. Eva, who could drink men twice her size under a rickety pub table and still walk a straight line out the door. Eva, whose texts stopped one afternoon three Augusts ago, mid-sentence.
"Booth," Silas said. He already had the clean glasses in his hand, a cloth thrown over his shoulder like a flag of truce. "You two want time, do it without leaning on my bar."
"Still owning the place with that velvet growl," she said to him .
"Still owing someone with that taste in gin," he said.
He moved with that slight hitch in his left knee, an old rhythm that made furniture do the work for him. The Raven's Nest breathed behind him, a low steady hum of talk, ice settling in buckets, old maps seamed to the walls like veins. Black and white photographs watched us from their frames, people who had danced or bled in these rooms long before we rubbed our lives against the varnished wood.
We took the back booth where the seat had a split in the vinyl. You could feel the tear against the back of your thigh if you slumped. I did not.
She put the tumbler down and traced a circle in a bead of water, one fingertip slow. She had a tiny scar in the web of that hand. New.
"You look the same from far away," she said. "Up close, no."
"I cook rice and exile," I said. "Does that add years or take them away, I forget."
"Delivery girl on a scooter," she said. "That is a downgrade from your father's baritone about chambers and their noble rats."
"My father can afford to haunt old courtrooms because my mother haunts classrooms. He is a rat who thinks he is a hawk."
"Same poetry, then. Good."
"What happened to Eva."
She took the water then, a long swallow as if it stripped the words before they came out.
"I used to love this room," she said. "Do you remember that first time we sneaked in. You nicked your mother's bronze cardigan, thought the colour made you look old enough to order an ale."
"You borrowed your brother's cap," I said. "Thought it gave you a jaw. You looked like a mushroom in an Irish film."
"And we wrote our names on a napkin. Stupid. 'Eva and Rory escape to London, two tickets, no return' underlined twice. Drama queens." She breathed out . "I came. I called. You did not pick up."
"That is not how I recall it."
"My phone filled with your maps of bus routes and safe hostels. Then it emptied. Your messages turned into a screenshot of a police form with a black line over your address."
"You told me to leave, so I did."
"I told you to let me meet you at the station."
"I stood at the station for an hour and a half," I said. "I made watchtowers out of suitcase trolleys. I counted men whose shoes could crush my foot by accident. You did not come."
Her mouth went flat.
"A man put his hands around my throat at half past four that day," she said without heat . "So I did not come, no."
The table between us seemed to tilt. The green neon from the sign out front left a faint wash on the wood, a bruise-colour you could miss if you glanced.
"What man," I said, though I knew which man. Names sit behind your teeth a long time.
"The one you left," she said. "The one who said you would be so much harder to hit if you learned to run. He did not hit me. He wanted to. He shook me like a bell. Made sure I heard the sound."
"Why did you never tell me."
"I tried. My messages found a void. Someone clever turned your numbers into dead birds. I was not that clever then."
"You look it now."
She put her chin in her hand. The buzzcut made her look like someone who had set fire to a past and watched it with her arms folded.
"I took a job," she said. "Then another job. Swapped notes with men who despise being watched and make a career of it. Learned to move cash without a trail. Learned to borrow someone else's face for an afternoon. I woke up one day and people had begun to look through me because I trained them to."
"That sounds like theatre to the posh. What connection are you selling."
"You always flatten what you do not like into a joke," she said, but her eyes softened . "It kept me breathing. I would have used that when we were twenty if I had known."
"You always liked the idea that you could toss a match into a dry field and get a sky to write with," I said. "Now you talk like a grant application."
"Clean words when dirty work sits under them. Cardiff taught me that, same as you did."
Silas set a small plate between us. Two slices of apple, a curl of Manchego. Something to put your fingers to when your tongue did not know where to lay.
"Do not dissect my cheese," he said. "It cost a favour in Madrid thirty years ago and a postman who never got his left shoe back."
Eva's laugh came out and startled both of us. It knocked against the photographs, and for a second we could have been nineteen . She wiped the corner of her eye with her thumb, left a dot of mascara like a beauty spot. Then she saw the crescent scar on my wrist, the one you can pretend is a moon if you are drunk enough.
"He tried to drown you till you learned to breathe water," she said. "I should not have left you to learn that alone."
"You told me to leave," I said again because otherwise the heat in my chest would have nowhere to go.
"And you took it as a command," she said. "Not a plan. You always did listen too hard when someone used your name in a sentence."
"Do not," I said. The word tasted like tin.
She tilted her head.
"I kept a photograph of us on my kitchen wall. The one from the pier. Your hair long and my fringe in my eyes. We look like we are about to run. I could not take it down. It made me brush my teeth at night with my back to the wall."
"So you married your work," I said. "Congratulations on your tasteful ceremony."
"I did marry," she said quietly.
That silenced the corner. I felt it ripple.
"Not to it. To him. Briefly. He had opinions about my voice, my skirts, my friends. I left one morning with a carrier bag and a cracked tooth. I should have phoned you. I was too proud to let you be the one person who had not abandoned me, and then teach you how it feels to watch me repeat it anyway."
"People change," I said.
"Do they. Or do they sharpen."
"Either way, you did not say goodbye," I said.
"You did not either."
She reached into her bag. Leather, black, perfect creases from a manufacturer who understands that women like pockets. She pulled out something a child would recognise, because children are the last ones who try to keep pictures from losing what they mean. A strip of photo booth shots, the kind that makes you look more like yourself because there is no time to pose.
In the first frame, we had jammed shoulders together, too wide a grin. In the second, my cheek had a smear of blue where I had tried to draw a star for a gig and missed. In the third, she reached up to fix it and caught my chin in her fingers. In the fourth, we were both looking to the side at something out of frame, eyes slanted into the same suspicion. That last one hurt.
"You carried that," I said.
"Folded under a passport till the corners are thin as thoughts. I am not here to pull you into some scheme, before you say it."
"I was about to."
"I came to see if you were a rumour," she said. "If you had turned into a photograph. Also, someone looked for you with my voice last month. I want to know if you noticed."
"A call," I said.
"Three. 'Laila, meet me at Chalk Farm Wednesday, wear the red scarf, bring the papers' without saying what papers. I do not waste a good alias on small men, so that stuck. I told Silas last night. He told me to come today if I wanted to live long enough to regret it."
I looked past her. Silas stood by the bookshelf with the Kelloggs Corn Flakes tin where he hides small notes. His ring tapped once, a dull sound under the clink of the till. He pretended to polish a glass.
"You still know the way," he said without looking over. "You can use it."
"You built a door into a story," she said, almost fond. "Cute."
"History is a room," he said. "Now, take your nostalgia somewhere it will not choke the regulars."
He was right. The neon buzz made my teeth hum. The booth pushed our knees together and made every word feel like a coin passing hands.
We slid out. The seat gripped that fraction of fabric where the vinyl split. The shelf had a row of Navy handbooks and a Greek atlas with the spine repaired by someone who liked tape as an idea. Silas pressed a finger to the atlas and it released my old breath, stale and smoked-in. The back room did not open with a drama; it clicked and made space for us the way a hand opens and expects another hand to fit there.
Inside smelt like paper and polish, old wood that has learned what secrets taste like. A low table, two chairs that had been sat in by men who carried a different kind of weight . A photograph of three women in crisp coats outside the Embassy that had changed names five times.
"Sit," Silas said.
"I do not obey men in rooms anymore," Eva said, then she sat anyway and smiled. "Force of habit. I will kick that one next."
"You will break your foot," he said. "Now speak."
"Someone fished for her last month using my tone as bait," she said. "Someone with enough of a budget to mask the trail in charity emails and a chess club's group chat. That is not a drunk ex. That is a grown-up."
I watched the way she arranged her hands, the right one over the left, thumb resting on the scar. You can tell who taught someone to hide their nerves by how they fail at it.
"Why not tell me last night," I said.
"Because I needed to see your face before I decided whether to be cruel," she said. "You have the same mouth as the girl who would let me steal her dinner. She would forgive too much. I needed to see if you would walk into a train station because I told you to. You did not. You told me not to."
"We both have learned stupid tricks," I said.
Silas poured something from nowhere into three tiny glasses. The liquid had that plum -gloss look of East European grandmothers. He kept one, nodded to the other two.
"You still bleed for strangers," he said to me. "You still make money out of stories," he said to her. "I know who did the calls."
"You did not lead with that," Eva said.
"I do not lead with dessert," he said.
"Who," I said.
He pushed a scrap of paper over to me. Not a name, a small stamped image of a bird with clipped wings. Old symbol. My stomach remembered the angle of that beak before my head did.
"No," I said softly .
"You know it," Eva said.
"It sat in the corner of a flyer someone slid under my door when I moved in," I said. "Blues for the Unseen, a night class that did not have a teacher. A message board from uni days when boys with rings said they made art out of secrets. Evan had a tattoo of it," I added, and my voice wanted to close.
"You never told me that," Eva said.
"You did not come on the train," I said back.
"The symbol moved after you left," Silas said. "It moved money. It bought men. Now it buys names. Yours has value because you made a mess the last time you said no."
"Are we workshopping my biography," I said. "Or are we running."
Eva leaned in, and the new scent she wore, clean and medicinal, slid under the room's polish.
"He is not asking you to run," she said. "He is asking you to choose where you stand."
"I am tired of floors that open," I said.
"You do not have to fall through," she said. "You can build a rail."
"You hired poetry," Silas said to her. "Be careful, it costs more than you think."
He nodded at the door. "Five minutes. Then the bar will come apart if you do not do something clever with your faces."
It did not take five. The green light outside stuttered once. A man's voice at the front called a name that made my skin tighten. Not mine.
"Eva O'Dwyer."
We went still.
"You said 'someone looked for you with my voice last month'," I said.
"I left a trail this morning," she said under her breath. "Stupid. I have been clean for so long I wanted to see if they could still smell me."
"You and your tests," I said.
Silas moved to the crack of the door and looked without looking. He shifted his weight and the knee made that soft skit sound it made on rainy days. He did not swear.
"Do not go out," he said.
"I will not hide," she said.
"You will if I say so," he said in that old agent cadence, a strand of steel under the velvet . "He brought four. Not bouncers. Bless your old pier photographs, both of you. This will be ugly."
I stood. My hands shook, which amused some part of my spine.
"Who," I said.
"Your old lover's drinking buddy," Silas said. "And the bird on his throat. He has a new beak. He is a messenger with a knife."
"Tell me you locked the front when you closed your mouth," Eva said, voice smooth as that first gin .
"I own a bar in Soho," Silas said. "Every lock is a suggestion. Get ready."
The bookshelf door opened wider with a sigh as something heavy under the bottle-racks gave. Voices folded in, metal on wood, the scrape of stools. A glass fell and rang. Someone laughed that thin laugh some men use as foreplay to pain.
"Come on then," a voice called, lazy-sly. "Laila. Make this quick. You owe a conversation."
I stepped forward. Eva's hand found my wrist above the little crescent and held just there hard enough to make the scar not mine for a second.
"We do not run," she said.
"We are not nineteen and drunk on the pier," I said.
"No," she said. "We are sober in a room full of old photographs. We make our own."
Silas lifted his glass and smashed it into the edge of the table with a precise flick. The bottom fell clean, a sharp mouth.
"Be polite," he said. "And be quick."