AI The rain had followed her in, and Silas didn't look up from the glass he was polishing . He never did. Rory liked that about him. She hung her jacket on the hook by the door, where the smell of duck fat and sesame would sit all evening, and took her usual stool at the far end of the bar , where the maps on the wall were oldest and the light from the green neon sign outside leaked in and gave everything a drowned, underwater colour.
"Shift?" Silas said.
"Twenty-two deliveries. One dog." She flexed her hands . "Let me guess. Mr. Okafor's usual."
"Fourteen-forty."
She dug the notes out of her wallet and slid them across the bar . Silas took them without counting. He wore the signet ring on his right hand, as always, and the polish cloth moved in his fingers with the same unhurried rhythm you'd want from a man doing something a great deal more serious. Rory had learned, over the eleven months of living above his bar , that Silas was never not paying attention. He simply chose what to attend to.
He set a glass in front of her. Water. He knew she didn't drink on work nights, and he knew she liked the ice chipped, and it irritated her slightly that she was so legible to him.
Then the door opened again, and the rain came in a second time, and Eva walked through it.
It took Rory four seconds. She had a long history of not recognising people fast — she'd once walked past her own father outside a courtroom in Cardiff and smiled at him as though he were a stranger — but that wasn't what happened here. She recognised her immediately. That was the problem. She recognised her the way you recognise a word in a language you used to speak fluently and have now lost.
Eva had cut her hair. It was short now, sharp at the jaw, and it had been dyed the kind of unflashy dark that costs money. She wore a grey coat that had never been rained on before, or at least had never looked it. She held her bag with both hands, perched, as if she might need to leave.
She saw Rory. Stopped.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, God."
"Eva."
They did the thing people do. The half-step forward, the half-step back. Rory got off her stool. They embraced, briefly, awkwardly, the way two people embrace when neither is sure whether the other has forgiven them for anything. Eva smelled of a perfume Rory didn't know. Underneath it, faintly, of cigarettes.
"You look —" Eva said, and then didn't finish it, because whatever she'd been about to say would have had to be a lie.
"You too." Rory sat back down. "Sit. Sit down. What are you doing here?"
"I was meeting someone." Eva glanced at the door, then at her watch — a man's watch , heavy, real gold, loose on her wrist. "For work. They're late." She sat, two stools over, which is a strange distance to choose. Close enough to talk. Far enough that no part of them touched. "You live around here?"
"Upstairs."
"In the *bar *?"
"Above it. Yeah."
Silas appeared, silent as a rumour, and set down a glass of water and the bottle of the good whisky without being asked, which Rory found so presumptuous on so many levels that she couldn't decide whether to be grateful or furious . Eva looked at him once, took his measure the way she'd always taken people's measure, and something in her face went careful. She'd seen it too, then, the thing about Silas. Whatever it was that made men in expensive coats decide to be polite to him.
"Thanks," Eva said, and her voice had lost Cardiff. Not lost it exactly — she could still have found it if she'd wanted to. It was more like a coat taken off and folded and put away in a cupboard somewhere, for a house that no longer has the room.
Rory put her thumb on the scar on her left wrist. She didn't mean to. It was the crescent shape from the broken bottle on the beach at Barry Island, the summer they were eleven, and Eva had been the one who ran for her mother, and it was, when you thought about it, the beginning of every story Rory had about Eva: Eva running for help on Rory's behalf. She pressed it flat with her thumb and left it there.
"So," Rory said. "You're a lawyer now."
"Solicitor. Yes."
"I heard."
"You heard?"
"Your mum told mine. It got all the way to Dublin." Rory turned the glass on the bar . "It's funny. My dad's a barrister. I did two years of Pre-Law at Cardiff. And now you're the one." She said it lightly . It came out not light. "Weren't you going to be a photographer?"
Eva laughed, one syllable. "God. That was a very long time ago."
"It was three years ago."
"Two and a half." Eva's eyes went to the door again. "You know I came to see you. When you first came to London. Before it got — I came to see you twice, and you weren't answering. And then you moved and you didn't send anyone the address. I found out you were here from Laila. Six months late."
"You could have found out sooner if you'd asked."
"I did ask."
Rory had nothing to say to that. The rain picked up against the window, and the green neon flickered , and the photographs on the wall — Prague, Berlin, a street in Beirut that Silas had never once explained — looked down on them with the flat, uninterested curiosity of places that had outlived everyone in them.
"How's your mother?" Rory said finally.
"Fine. Same. How's Evan?"
The name landed in the room like a dropped plate. Rory had not heard it said out loud in eleven months. She heard Silas turn a page, three feet away, in the way a man turns a page when he is not reading.
"Gone," Rory said.
"Rory —"
"No, it's fine. Gone. He's gone. It's — I left ." She heard the way she said it, the childishness of it, *I left *, as though leaving were an achievement, as though it hadn't taken her four years and a phone call from another woman. "You told me to. You told me to and I didn't, and then I did. And I never —" She stopped. Adjusted the glass. "Anyway."
Eva looked at her for a long moment. It was the look of a person who has prepared something for years and now can't remember whether it was an apology or an accusation.
"I should have come to Cardiff," Eva said.
"You did come to Cardiff."
"I came once, at Christmas. I stood outside your flat for twenty minutes in the car park. That's not coming to Cardiff, that's — driving through it." She turned her watch on her wrist, once, twice, a small mechanical tic. "I didn't get out."
"Why not?"
"Because I was angry with you."
"With *me *."
"Yes." Eva's voice was quiet and level, a professional voice. "Because I called you, and I got you here, and I gave you my key, and my flat, and my friends, and I cancelled things, and I sat on the floor of that awful room with you for three weeks and I watched you not leave. And you wouldn't leave. And every time I said it, you found a reason. And I thought —" She breathed. "I thought, if I stay, I'll have to hate you. Or I'll have to be the person who keeps you alive. And I didn't want to be either. So I left London. And I didn't tell you. And that is what I did, and I know what it was."
The rain was the only thing moving.
"What was it?" Rory said.
"Abandonment." Eva said the word the way a lawyer says a word she has read in a file. Flat, correct, and nowhere near adequate. "It's what my own father did, is what it was, and I did it, to you, because it was easier than watching. And I told myself you'd be fine. And you *were * fine. That's the — that's the thing that's hardest, actually. That you were fine."
Rory's hand had closed around her wrist again, thumb on the crescent. She thought about the car park at Christmas, the wet tarmac, the headlights she'd assumed belonged to someone visiting the launderette. She thought about the twenty minutes. It made a shape in her chest, an ugly one, and she didn't know whether it was fury or grief or just the recognition of a debt that could never be squared off.
"I was not fine," she said.
"No." Eva's eyes had gone bright, but she did not look away, and Rory had to give her that, had to give her the whole thing. "No. I don't imagine you were ."
The door opened. A man came in with rain on his shoulders, looking around at the maps and the photographs, and Eva stood up, and she took her coat, and she did not put it on.
"That's mine," she said.
"I know."
"It's a merger. It's — eleven hours, and then it's done, and then I'm back in Cardiff for a fortnight." She hesitated, and then she did something Rory had not expected, which was to write her number on the corner of a beer mat, in the same horrible looping handwriting she'd had at eleven. She put it on the bar between them, nearer Rory. "The flat's the same flat. If you're ever — it's the same flat."
"All right."
"[Eva]," Silas said, from behind the bar , and Eva looked over, startled, because she had not told him her name. He didn't explain. He simply tipped his head, a small gesture, the kind that in another life had meant get down or go now, and then he went back to his glasses and his cloth.
Eva left. The bell above the door rang, and settled.
Rory sat with the beer mat and the whisky she hadn't touched and the water that had gone warm. After a while she picked the mat up and turned it over. On the other side, in the same handwriting, older, faded, printed in biro and rained on and dried and kept for two and a half years in a coat pocket: *Come to London. E.*
She put it down. She put her thumb back on the scar, and pressed.