AI The green bled through the rain first. Rory saw it from the top of the stairs, that sour-sweet neon wash from the sign above The Raven's Nest spilling across the wet pavement of the side street, turning puddles the color of bottle glass. She took the back steps down from her flat two at a time, her delivery bag thumped against her hip, smelling faintly of chili oil and damp canvas no matter how many times she wiped it out. The dinner rush for the Golden Empress was done. Yu-Fei had waved her off with a takeaway box she hadn't asked for and a look that said eat, and now the night was hers and too quiet.
Inside, the Nest was warm and low-lit the way it always was, lamps turned down until the old maps on the walls looked like skin, the black-and-white photographs gone soft at the edges. Someone had put Nina Simone on low. The air held beer and lemon polish and the iron tang of rain coming off coats.
Silas was behind the bar. He moved the way he always moved, economy over speed, his left leg dragging just a half-beat behind the right. He nodded when he saw her, the grey-streaked auburn of his beard catching the light. He was polishing a glass with a white cloth, his silver signet ring clicking faintly against it on his right hand, and his hazel eyes did a quick inventory — wet hair, tired mouth — before he set the glass down.
"Off the clock?" he said.
"Off," Rory said. She shrugged out of her jacket. Her straight black hair, shoulder-length and gone frizzy at the ends from the rain, stuck to her neck. She pushed it back. "Yu-Fei fed me again."
"Good. You look like you skip." He poured without asking, half a bitter, and slid it across. "Slow night."
She wrapped her hands around the glass. On her left wrist, just below the heel of her thumb, the small crescent-shaped scar went pale against her skin when it was cold. She'd gotten it at nine falling off a wall in Cardiff while showing off, and her mother had cried more than she had. Jennifer Ellis — that was before she was Carter, before twenty-six years of teaching other people's children how to parse sentences while her own daughter learned how to argue like her barrister father. Rory could still hear Brendan's voice at the dinner table. Go on then, Aurora, persuade me. She had been good at it. She had been going to be good at it for a living.
The door opened and let in a gust of wet air and street noise, and Rory didn't look up until Silas did, his gaze sharpening in that particular way he had, the old habit underneath the publican's ease.
The woman at the door was shaking out an umbrella. Dark blonde hair cut to a sharp bob, a camel coat too good for Soho on a Thursday, heels that clicked wrong on the sticky floor. She looked around the bar like she was checking for someone and trying not to seem like she was, and then her eyes landed on Rory and stopped.
Rory felt it in her stomach before her brain caught up.
"Eva?"
Eva Pritchard laughed, a short disbelieving sound, and came forward too fast, heels slipping. "Oh my God. Rory?"
It had been four years since they'd stood in the same room. Not since the kitchen of their rented house in Cathays, Cardiff, with Pre-Law textbooks stacked on the washing machine and someone's boyfriend burning pasta. Rory had been twenty-one and certain about everything. Eva had been the loud one, the one who could talk a bouncer into letting the whole street in, who dyed her hair pink for Rag Week and cried when Rory got the mooting prize because she was prouder than Rory was. This woman in the camel coat was thinner in the face. Makeup precise. Bright blue eyes — no, Rory's were the bright blue ones, hers had always been quick and observant — Eva's eyes skated over Rory's delivery bag on the floor, the damp uniform top, the bar stool, and Rory felt herself being inventoried and found altered.
"You live here?" Eva said. They hugged awkwardly, coat to damp denim, smelling of rain and Eva's expensive perfume and underneath it something familiar , coconut shampoo from when they were fifteen.
"Above," Rory said. "Flat upstairs. I — what are you doing here?"
"I was meeting—" Eva gestured vaguely toward the back, toward the bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf, though she couldn't know that. "A work thing. Client drinks that got moved. I swear this place wasn't here before." She perched on the next stool, crossed her legs at the ankle the way Rory didn't remember her ever sitting. "You look— God, you look exactly the same."
Rory snorted before she could stop it. "Liar."
Silas set a coaster down in front of Eva with a quiet authority that settled the flurry around them. "What can I get you?"
"White wine, please. Small." Eva smiled at him, automatic charm , then back to Rory. "Are you still — are you at —" She stopped. "Mum said you left Cardiff."
The weight of it landed between them. Mum said. As if Jennifer Carter reported dutifully to the Pritchards and Eva had to hear it secondhand.
"I left in March," Rory said. Her voice stayed level. Cool-headed, her father used to call it, like it was a compliment instead of a warning. "I'm doing deliveries for the Golden Empress. Part-time."
Eva's mouth did something complicated. "Right. You called — when you called, you said London, but I thought — I thought you'd go to chambers or something. You were always going to do the Bar. Brendan must have—"
"Brendan thinks I'm wasting a brain," Rory said. "He told me so, at length, in that voice he uses for closing arguments."
"It was a joke, Ror." Eva twisted something on her right hand, a thin gold band Rory hadn't noticed. Wedding. When had that happened? Facebook would know , but Rory had deleted Facebook the week she left Evan, the week she changed her number and learned how quiet a phone could be. "When I said come to London, I meant — I have a spare room in Stratford, I meant properly. Not —" She glanced up at the ceiling, at the flat above, at the maps and the photographs of men in hats who were long dead.
"Properly," Rory repeated. She drank. The bitter was cold and good. "You were busy."
"I was —" Eva looked down at her wine when Silas set it down, murmured thanks without meeting his eyes. He drifted to the far end of the bar, giving them room without leaving, his limp audible in the quiet between songs. Limp, pour, wipe. "I was in Manchester for that secondment. And then the wedding, and Tom's mum was ill, and I kept meaning to ring. I did ring. Twice."
"I know ." Rory remembered the voicemails, heard on the night bus with her bag between her knees. Eva, bright and breathless: You made it! You're here! We'll do dinner, I know a place in Shoreditch, bring that idiot ex of yours if you must, kidding, God, don't. She hadn't mentioned Evan again after Rory told her. After Rory finally said it plainly in a two-minute message — he hit me, Ev, it wasn't once — and Eva had gone silent for three days and then sent a paragraph about being so sorry and so busy and we must talk properly.
They hadn't talked properly.
"You look well," Rory said, because someone had to be kind. "City law suits you. You're all—" She gestured at the coat, the bob. "Sleek."
Eva laughed, but it snagged. "I'm conveyancing in Canary Wharf, Ror. I'm the most boring person I know . I wanted human rights. Remember? We were going to share a chambers and terrify judges."
"You were going to terrify them. I was going to do the paperwork."
"You won every moot." Eva's eyes were shining now, and she blinked hard. "God. Sorry. It's just weird seeing you here. I keep thinking about that party. Phil's house. Second year."
Rory went very still. She knew which party. Everyone remembered parties differently; she remembered that one in sensory fragments. Cheap cider, someone's playlist too loud, Eva waving her over, saying you have to meet Evan, he's hilarious, he's in his third year, and Evan with his easy grin holding out a plastic cup like an offering.
"I introduced you," Eva said quietly. She wasn't looking at Rory now. She was looking at her own hands around the wine glass, at the gold band she kept turning. "I keep thinking if I hadn't — if I'd seen — he was always a bit much when he drank, but I didn't know . I swear I didn't know ."
For a long moment Rory heard only Nina Simone and the rain ticking against the green-lit windows. She thought about the girl she had been at twenty-one, quick with objections, certain her cleverness was armor. She thought about how long it had taken to understand that cleverness meant nothing when someone you loved learned exactly where to press. She thought about leaving Cardiff with a black eye fading yellow and her Pre-Law notes still in a box she never unpacked.
"You couldn't have," Rory said. It was true and not the whole truth, which was that she had stopped answering Eva's calls not because she blamed her but because she couldn't stand to be the cautionary tale in Eva's sleek new life, couldn't stand the pity threaded through the affection .
Eva nodded too quickly , grateful and unconvinced. "Are you — is it better here?"
Rory looked around the Nest, at the maps Silas collected from God knew where, at the photographs of Soho when it was all jazz and sharp suits, at Silas himself watching the door with that quiet, practiced attention. Upstairs her flat was small and hers, rent paid with tip money and no one shouting through the walls. Yu-Fei trusted her with the long runs. Silas left soup outside her door when she worked double shifts without making a thing of it.
"It's different," she said. "I'm different."
Eva reached out then and touched the crescent scar on Rory's wrist, lightly , with one fingertip, the way she used to when they were kids daring each other on that wall. "You still show off?"
"Only for money now," Rory said, and Eva laughed for real this time, a crack of the old Eva, loud and unguarded, and something in Rory's chest loosened and ached at once.
They talked then, carefully at first and then faster, about Cardiff and mothers and Tom, who sounded kind, and the spare room in Stratford that was now a nursery, and Rory told a story about getting lost delivering to a mansion block in Peckham that made Eva snort wine. Time folded and unfolded. Four years sat between them on the spare stool, visible only when they glanced at it — in the pause when Eva asked if she ever thought about going back to law and Rory said not yet, in the way Rory didn't ask why Eva hadn't come to find her sooner.
When Eva's phone buzzed with the client, she stood, smoothed her coat, became sleek again. At the door she hugged Rory hard, fiercely, coconut and rain.
"Don't disappear," Eva whispered.
"You know where I am," Rory said. "Green sign. Can't miss it."
She watched Eva go out into the wet light, heels clicking, umbrella up. The door swung shut. The bar settled.
Silas came back, refilled Rory's half without comment. His ring caught the lamplight.
"Old friend?" he said.
"The oldest," Rory said, and drank, and stayed where she was, where she could still see the green bleeding through the rain.