AI The wobble in table six had outlived three landlords, and Rory finished it with a folded beermat.
"Four," Silas said from behind the bar. "You forget the Irishman."
"The Irishman doesn't count. He never lifted anything heavier than a tab."
Silas made the sound that passed for his laugh and went back to his glasses. Thursday at the Nest, the slow shift. The green neon hummed through the window and laid a stripe across the bar. Old maps curled on the walls between the black-and-white photographs, cities Silas had known under other names, though he never said which. Rory worked through her lager and picked sesame oil off her cuff. Eleven hours on the Golden Empress scooter, and the smell outlasted the soap.
The door opened and let the street in.
Camel coat, too clean for Berwick Street. Hair the colour of money. The woman laughed at something on her phone, a laugh with a crack down the middle, and Rory's hand stopped on the glass.
She knew that laugh . School corridors. The top deck of the number 8 bus. A rooftop in Grangetown with a stolen bottle of Lambrini and the whole black glitter of the bay below them. She knew it the way you know a song from a house you no longer live in.
The woman reached the bar. "Prosecco, please."
Silas gave the order the pause it deserved.
"She'll have the red. The Nest doesn't do bubbles."
The woman turned at the voice. The smile stayed on her face, but it stopped meaning anything.
"Rory?"
"Eva."
"Jesus wept." Her hand came up over her mouth, a gesture from another life. Rory watched herself not get up. Three years ago she would have been out of the chair before the name landed. Tonight she stayed seated and let Eva cross the distance alone.
"Look at you." Eva took the next stool. The coat sighed against the brass rail. "You look like someone who knows things."
"I deliver noodles."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"The small voice. You never had the small voice."
Silas set the red down in front of her. He held Eva's eye a second longer than manners required, then limped away down the bar, signet ring ticking once against the wood as he went.
"Your barman's frightening."
"He's a pussycat."
"He's measuring me for a coffin."
"That's his hello."
Eva drank too fast, red wine taken like a shot. "I practised this in the taxi. A whole speech."
"Practised what?"
"Finding you." She turned the glass by the stem. "I went to the Golden Empress first. Yu-Fei says hello. She also says you don't eat enough, and she wrote it on a napkin, so it's official."
"You went to the restaurant first."
"Yes."
"So this isn't a reunion. It's an errand."
"Can't it be both?"
Rory let the question sit. Up close, the years had done careful work on Eva. The gap in her teeth had gone. The Cardiff had gone with it, the valleys ironed flat out of her vowels, and in their place something polished and unplaceable, a voice for conference rooms. Only the laugh had kept its crack.
"You've lost your accent."
"Clients hear the valleys, they offer less." Eva's fingers found the stem of the glass again. "Strategic communications."
"That's PR in a trench coat."
"And a ring." Eva held up her left hand, and a diamond caught the neon. "Hugo."
"Hugo."
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said it in the voice."
Rory's mouth twitched. "Congratulations. Genuinely. Does he know you once dared me to climb the Penarth pier railing in February?"
"He knows a version of me who owns more than one coat." Eva's gaze dropped to Rory's left wrist, where the small crescent scar sat pale against the skin. "Still got my mark."
"Best dare you ever gave me."
"You fell on a broken Fanta bottle."
"I climbed first. The falling was a bonus."
Something loosened in Eva's face, and for a moment the girl from the rooftop sat there instead, all dares and volume, seventeen and immortal.
"You used to apologise to chairs," Eva said. "Walk into a chair, say sorry to it. Do you remember?"
"Chairs got mean."
Eva laughed, and the crack in it widened. "God, I missed you. Two years, four months. I counted."
Rory had counted too. She took a drink instead of saying so.
"Do you ever see anyone from back?" Eva asked. "Your dad?"
"He sends a reading list at Christmas. I send a card. It works."
"And the bookshop? Hay-on-Wye, the plan, the whole-" Eva caught herself. "I buy books in airports now."
"That's the saddest sentence in the English language."
"I know ." Eva smiled at her glass. "I know it is."
The neon hummed. Somewhere under the bar, the fridge kicked in. Rory waited. She had learnt, in the flat above this bar, in rooms far worse than it, that people carrying something heavy always put it down eventually. You only had to give them the floor.
"Do you ever think about Evan?" Eva said.
There it was.
"You introduced us."
"He was lovely at first."
"He was lovely when people were watching. It's a different skill."
Eva's thumb worried at the base of her ring. "My twenty-second. You wore the green dress. You hugged me with one arm all night."
"I'd cracked a rib."
"I saw the bruise on your wrist. Your right wrist. I told myself it was climbing."
Rory turned her left hand over, the crescent up. "Your mark's on this side. The right one was his. You knew the difference, Eva. You taught me the difference between a fall and a grip before I did."
"I know ."
"You said, come to London. The night I finally left him. You said, get on the train, I'll meet you at Paddington, we'll sort everything."
"Rory."
"I waited two hours."
"I was there." The polish cracked open and the valleys flooded back through, and Eva's voice came up out of somewhere old and unrenovated. "The mezzanine. I saw you come through the barrier, and you looked like someone had taken you apart and put you back wrong, and I turned around and walked out. I wore the yellow scarf. All night, after, I kept thinking, she'll have seen the scarf."
"I did see the scarf."
Eva's head came up.
"I knitted that scarf."
The bar sounds went on somewhere far off, a glass, low talk, the fridge. Eva sat very still, and then she folded, elbows on the bar, forehead down into her hands, and the diamond pressed against her own skin like it belonged to someone else's life.
"I was a coward, butt. That's the whole of it. No excuse worth saying. I was a coward, and you needed me, and I walked out."
Three years ago Rory would have cried. Would have reached for her, both of them folding into the old shape, the rooftop shape, sorry said to chairs and everyone forgiven by morning. She sat and looked at the bent crown of Eva's head and felt the thing move through her like weather through a street, and she let it pass.
"Yes," she said. "You were."
Eva straightened. Wiped her face with the heel of her hand, unglamorous, the first honest thing she'd done all night.
"Your ears used to go red when you lied," she said. "Remember? I could always catch you. Your ears aren't red now."
"They learned."
"That's worse than the scar, you know . That's the thing that's keeping me up."
"Then tell me why tonight." Rory kept her voice level, the way Silas kept the bar, nothing wasted. "Two years and four months of nothing, and tonight you find Yu-Fei and you find this bar and you've practised a speech in the taxi. People don't wander into the Nest, Eva. It isn't on the way to anything."
Eva reached into the camel coat and took out her phone, then seemed to think better of it and set it face down on the wood.
"He rang me. Tuesday before last."
The neon hummed. Rory's hand stayed exactly where it was on the glass, and she was proud of it, distantly, the way you're proud of a stranger.
"He does charity work now. He photographs well." Eva's mouth twisted. "He was lovely on the phone. Lovely the way he is when people are watching, only nobody was, and he still did it, and that scared me more than anything."
"What did you tell him."
"Nothing. I swear to you, nothing."
Down the bar, the signet ring ticked once against the wood. Rory heard it. Eva didn't.
"But he knew things," Eva said. "He knew you left Cardiff. He knew London. He said it casual, like gossip, like it cost him nothing. Rory." Her voice dropped, and the last of the polish went with it. "He knew about the Golden Empress. He said the name."
The fridge cut out and the silence came in under the door like the cold had, patient, in no hurry. Rory looked at the red neon stripe on the bar, at Eva's phone face down like something that might go off, at the maps on the walls, all those cities under all those other names.
"He's early," she said.
"What?"
"I gave him three years. He's taken two." She set her glass down, centred it on its beermat, a small thing done properly. "I expected him a year ago."
Eva stared at her, at the black hair and the level eyes and the woman who no longer apologised to chairs, and Rory watched her old friend finish the arithmetic, watched her understand that the girl she'd abandoned at Paddington had stopped waiting for anyone at all.
"Silas," Rory said.
"Already heard."