AI The rain came down Frith Street in ropes, and the green sign above the door of The Raven's Nest hummed against it like a held note. Rory shouldered through the weather with the insulated bag over her arm, smelling of chilli oil and star anise, and set the last delivery of the night on the bar.
"You ordered ribs again."
"I ordered nothing. Someone with excellent taste has been impersonating me." Silas didn't look up from the glass he was polishing , though the glass had been dry for some time. His beard was trimmed as neatly as ever, grey coming through the auburn like frost through bracken, and when he reached for the cloth his left leg dragged its old half-second behind him. The silver signet caught the lamplight as he tapped the bar twice — sit, stay — and went back to pretending he hadn't noticed her wet hair or the five flights of Tower Bridge Road in her calves.
The Nest was nearly empty on a Tuesday. Maps of cities that had changed names covered the walls, and above the optics hung photographs of men in overcoats squinting into sunlight that had gone out before she was born. She liked the room for the same reason she'd liked it the first week: nothing in it required her to explain herself.
She was unzipping the bag when the door blew open on a gust of wet wool and perfume she almost knew.
"Sorry — could I just, out of the—" The woman stopped, dripping, phone in hand. "Rory?"
Her body knew before she did. The tilt of the head. The way the laugh arrived in the eyebrows first. Four years, and it walked in ahead of the name.
"Eva."
She said it the way you set down something you'd been carrying a long way.
"Oh my God. Rory Carter." Eva stood there with rain flattening her dark curls, in a coat too good for the weather, and neither of them moved for a second, as if the hug had to be negotiated through channels. Then it was a hug, brief and fierce and over before either of them could ruin it.
"I was meant to be at a tasting on Dean Street," Eva said, pulling back . "Venue double-booked. It's biblical out there. Your sign looked friendly."
"It's the friendliest thing about the place."
Silas set down a glass of red without being asked , touched two fingers to the bar in Eva's direction, and found a reason to be at the far end that had something to do with a stocktake. Rory took the stool facing the door and put Eva in the other, and only when she was sitting did she understand she'd done it again — back covered, exit in view, the way she chose every seat now. At twenty-one she'd have sat anywhere.
"Right," Eva said, and then the machinery of small talk coughed into life. Cardiff. The bay all glass towers now. Mrs. Price finally retired after forty years of terrorising the sixth form. The chip shop on City Road was flats. Eva was in her second year of a training contract — family law, "which means I sit with people on the worst month of their lives and bill them for the tea" — and marrying a man called Daniel in June, in a barn near Brecon. "He's an engineer. He's kind in a spreadsheet way. He's good."
Rory heard herself say the right things. Congratulations. June was a good month. She learned that Eva's mum's hip was playing up and that Eva still put vinegar on everything, and gave back that she lived upstairs, that she delivered for Yu-Fei Cheung at the Golden Empress, that it was honest work, and the whole time there was a corridor of things neither of them walked down, wide as the bar.
"Your dad still asks after you," Eva said. "Whenever I'm round theirs. He's stopped asking about the law, I think."
"Has he."
The period landed like a door. Eva reached for her wine.
"You weren't at Siân's engagement," she said, gentler . "Everyone asked."
"I wasn't anywhere."
Eva nodded slowly , as if that were an answer, which it was. "You'd have had an invite," she said. "If I'd had an address."
"You'd have had a reply."
Outside, three men came in laughing too loudly, shaking off rain, and Rory's glass paused halfway to her mouth while her eyes did the arithmetic — three, drunk, happy, no interest in anyone but the pool table — and released it. They settled. She breathed. Eva was watching her with an expression she remembered from school, from the hundred times Rory had said something true and tried to take it back.
"You flinched."
"I didn't."
"Rory."
"It's nothing. Old habit." The phrase hung there, doing more work than she'd intended.
Eva let it go, or seemed to . Then, as Rory pushed her sleeve up to steady the candle in its jar, the lamplight found the crescent on her left wrist, pale and old, and Eva put down her glass.
"Is that the beans?"
"Tenby. The caravan. The opener slipped." Rory smiled despite herself. "It was lashing rain all week, same as this."
"You were eleven. You didn't cry. You just held your wrist over the sink and told me to get on with the tea." Eva's voice had changed. She turned her ring glass a quarter turn. "Rory, I've been wanting to say something for about four years, and I'm going to say it badly, and you can throw the wine at me after." She stopped. Started again. "The Odeon. February, years ago. That film with the war in it that neither of us watched. He had his hand on your arm when you reached over me for the popcorn, and there was a mark. Above your elbow. Thumb-shaped. And I bought Maltesers and told myself I'd imagined it, and I told myself you'd say if — I told myself a great many things, it turns out. That's my actual talent. Telling myself things." Her eyes were bright and she wasn't blinking enough. "Then you were gone, and I thought: that's the price of not asking."
The rain filled the pause. At the pool table somebody potted something and swore cheerfully about it.
"I'd have told you I walked into a door," Rory said.
"I'd have known you were lying."
"Then you'd have had to do something about it, and I'd have lied harder, and hated you a bit for seeing, and gone quieter. It wasn't your job to get me out." She turned her wrist over, considering the scar. "But thank you for saying it. Four years is a long time to carry a box of Maltesers."
Eva laughed, wet and short, and pressed the heel of her hand to one eye. "You absolute muppet."
"You sent me a voice note," Rory said. "After I left. You singing the whole of — something, drunk on your revision notes, a woman in the background telling you to shut up. I played it about two hundred times and never answered it. I kept thinking, when I'm someone you'd recognise, I'll ring her. And then a year went by, and a year's a kind of contract. After that the silence does your talking for you."
"I thought you blamed me. For the train. I put you on it. Come to London, I said, you'll be fine, and then I went home to my mum's roast and my nice life and let you be fine on your own."
"You were right, though. That was the problem. There's no good way to ring someone and say you were right and I'm still lost." She looked at the map above the optics, Vienna when it was called something else. "The rota at work has me down as Laila. Has done for a year. I never corrected it."
"Who's Laila?"
"No one. That was rather the point."
"It was never a job interview," Eva said. "I didn't need you to be anyone. I just used to like being in a room with you. You used to narrate the whole world, Rory. You'd have had this bar's entire history by now."
"It's not much of a history," Rory said, which was a lie of professional quality, and both of them looked at the men in the overcoats and let it stand.
Silas came down the bar then, collected the empties without a word, and paused. "I've stock to do," he said. "The good whisky's behind the bookshelf if she's staying." And he limped into the back, and a moment later came the soft click of a shelf that was not only a shelf.
Eva stared. "Did he just—"
"He does that."
"Through the bookshelf?"
"He's old-fashioned about his entrances and exits."
Eva's phone buzzed on the bar. DANIEL, said the screen, and a heart. Numbers were typed with cold thumbs, a taxi summoned, a promise assembled out of the materials at hand: the fourteenth of June, a barn near Brecon, a rubbish sofa that was hers. "Come before. Come after. Come any time. But come." Rory said she was slow. Eva said, "Slow's fine. Vanishing isn't," and this time the hug was held a full second longer, and then Eva was a shape crossing wet cobbles under the green light, and she did look back once through the glass, and raised her hand, and was gone .
Rory gathered the glasses. Two damp rings on the wood where the wine had sat. She stood a moment without wiping them.
"Friend of yours?" Silas called from the doorway of the back room, shirt sleeves rolled, an inventory clipboard under his arm and no inventory on it.
"Yes," she said. Then, because he of all people would know the difference: "Yes, she is."
Upstairs there was a kettle and a window and four years of not ringing anyone. She turned her wrist in the low light, the crescent pale as a moon with weather in it. In the morning she'd catch Yu-Fei between deliveries and ask for the rota back — Aurora, or Rory, anything but no one.
Small thing. But you started back the way you'd left, one small thing at a time, and the rain on the window kept on like applause from a long way off.