AI The green neon sign above The Raven's Nest was flickering again. It had been flickering the last night Rory saw it, four years ago, the R buzzing and dropping out so the place announced itself to the wet Soho street as The aven's Nest, and it was flickering now, in the same uneven rhythm, as if no time had passed at all and she had only stepped out for air.
She stood across the road with rain working through the shoulders of her coat and watched a couple duck in under the sign. The man shook out an umbrella. The woman laughed at something he said and put her hand, briefly and without thinking, on his arm as they went through the door. Rory had forgotten that ease , the ordinary theater of other people's evenings. In Cardiff she had learned to go home early. She had learned a lot of useful things in Cardiff, most of them forms of avoidance.
She crossed before she could make a better decision.
Heat met her first, then the smell. Lemon oil and old wood, beer, the faint iron tang of the radiators that had always run too hot in winter. The room was dimmer than she remembered, or she had gotten used to brighter places. Old maps papered the walls under glass gone slightly cloudy at the edges, black-and-white photographs crowded between them, men in coats on bridges, women squinting into foreign sunlight, streets that had been bombed or renamed or both. Her eyes found the corner by the dartboard where a new frame had gone up, smaller than the rest, and she looked away before she could make out who was in it.
He was behind the bar.
For a moment she saw him as a stranger would. A tall man gone thinner in the face, his grey-streaked auburn hair cut shorter than he used to wear it, the beard still neatly trimmed but almost entirely grey now. He was reading something through glasses perched low on his nose, and his right hand rested flat on the bar beside it, the silver signet ring catching the light when he turned a page. He had not worn glasses before. That undid her more than the grey, more than the new lines cut from his nose to his mouth. People aged in the ways you expected. Then they acquired small, practical humiliations and you understood the years had been real, and had been lived without you.
He looked up when the door shut behind her. The glasses came off slowly .
"Well," Silas said. "You'd better come in properly. You're letting the weather follow you."
She had rehearsed three opening sentences on the train from Cardiff and another two on the walk from the station, all of them cleaner than the truth. They left her. She went to the bar and set her wet bag on the stool beside her, the way you did if you did not know whether you were staying .
"Hi, Si."
"Rory."
He said her name without surprise, which she understood at once was a discipline. His hazel eyes did a quick, professional pass over her, the old habit, checking for injury, tail, distress, and then a second, slower look that was not professional at all. She knew what he was seeing. Her straight black hair still fell to her shoulders, though she wore it tucked behind her ears now instead of loose. No more delivery jacket. No more bitten nails. A dark suit under the wet coat, bought for court and worn soft at the cuffs. The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist showed when she reached to push her sleeve down, and she saw him notice that too, though his face gave nothing back.
"You cut the fringe," he said.
"You got glasses."
"Yes. A recent indignity. Whisky?"
"I don't, much, anymore."
He nodded as if she had confirmed a report. "Tea, then. Or I can ruin a perfectly good tonic with lime the way you used to like it."
"Tonic's fine."
She sat while he made it. His movements were the same, economical, unhurried, a man who had never wasted a gesture even when he was performing ease for a room full of people who needed watching. But going from the shelf to the counter he favored his left leg more heavily than she remembered, the old knee injury no longer a slight limp he could hide when he concentrated. The bottles knocked softly together when he set one down. Not a tremor, exactly. A new imprecision. She looked at the maps instead. Someone, probably him, had pressed a fresh pin into Prague.
"You kept the place," she said.
"Where else would I go? The flat upstairs has a tenant now. A cellist. She practices at respectable hours and pays on the first, which puts her ahead of some previous occupants."
"I paid."
"Eventually. Usually with an apology and a bag of dumplings from the Golden Empress."
That pulled a laugh out of her before she could guard against it. "Yu-Fei always gave me extra if I said they were for you."
"Yu-Fei is a strategist. She understood you were more likely to appear if food was involved."
He set the tonic in front of her with lime, two cubes of ice, in the short glass with the chipped base he had refused to throw away for reasons of superstition he would never admit to. She had broken a dozen better glasses washing up back there. She turned this one a quarter turn on its coaster.
"How long are you in London?" he asked.
"The case is listed for three days. Could run to four."
"Case." He leaned his forearms on the bar. The ring clicked faintly against the wood. "Your father rang me when you passed the Bar. He tried to sound as if it were ordinary news."
"That sounds like Dad."
"He was proud enough to frighten himself. Your mother sent a photograph of the wig. She said you looked severe and entirely correct and that she was going to have it framed for the hall."
Rory's throat went tight. "She did. It's still there. Dad can't pass it without straightening it."
Silas waited. His waiting had always been a room you eventually walked into and said the thing.
"She died in March," Rory said. "I should have told you myself. He said he'd called. I made that an excuse."
"He called in April. I sent flowers. I didn't come to the service because the invitation, if it was one, came through your father at a distance that seemed deliberate."
"It wasn't deliberate. It was cowardice. That's usually less deliberate and more thorough."
Outside, rain struck the windows and a bus sighed past, throwing red light briefly across the photographs. Inside, two men by the fire were arguing quietly about football, and the cellist's predecessor in her old flat, which was to say herself at twenty-two, twenty-three, seemed to be standing just at the edge of sight, damp from a delivery run, furious at the world and trying to pass it off as wit.
"I read about the case," Silas said at last. "In the papers. The girl you're representing. Nineteen."
"Twenty, now."
"You could have rung. Before the papers."
"I know."
"You could have rung before a great many things, Aurora."
No one else called her that except her parents and court. From Silas it had always been a signal, not of anger, but of a conversation leaving the shallows . She curled her fingers around the cold glass.
"I know how to do it in the wrong order. I've had practice."
"Have you come to apologize, or to find out if I'm angry?"
She met his eyes then. "Both. Either. I hadn't decided in a way that would survive actually seeing you."
"Honest, at least. That's new."
"It isn't new. It's just slower. I used to be honest very quickly , before anyone could make it count."
Something in his face eased, not forgiveness, only recognition, which hurt more because she had missed being known in exactly that unsparing way. In Cardiff there were people who loved her, colleagues who respected her, her father learning the shape of an empty house and ringing her on Sundays to discuss cases as if law were a language they could still speak safely. None of them had known her when she slept above a bar with a lock she changed twice because Evan had once found the street, when Silas left soup outside her door without knocking and taught her how to tell, entering a room, who had already decided to lie.
"You look well," he said, and she heard the cost of the simplicity.
"So do you. That's a lie, by the way. A partial one. You look thinner."
"And you look," he paused, choosing, "finished. Educated, I mean. Completed. As if someone finally made you sit still."
"Mum used to say grief was just admin with better flowers. After she got ill there wasn't much room for running around being unfinished."
"No. I imagine not."
She wanted to ask whether he had been ill. She wanted to ask who had driven him to hospital appointments, who knew how he took his tea when his knee kept him upstairs, whether the hidden back room behind the bookshelf still smelled of dust and paper, whether he had ever told anyone why she left, whether the note she had left on this bar at five in the morning, four lines long and not equal to anything, was still in the drawer by the till where he kept rubber bands and foreign coins and things people had not come back for. The questions crowded and cancelled each other.
"What did my note say?" she asked instead. "Exactly. Do you remember?"
"I burned it."
"Si."
"I did. It said you were sorry, that you had to go, that I shouldn't try Eva if I needed to find you, and that there was forty pounds in the teapot for the glass I hadn't noticed you'd broken." He folded his glasses and put them in his breast pocket. "It failed to mention Cardiff, your bar exams, or that you intended to become unreachable for four years. I read between the lines."
"I thought if I stayed I'd become one of yours. Properly. One of the people in the photographs who never quite comes home from anywhere." She turned the glass again. "You offered me that last job and I could feel how easy it would be to say yes and keep saying it. I was good at it. That frightened me more than Evan ever did. So I made you the villain of the piece because it was faster than admitting I wanted it."
The bar radio murmured. Ice shifted in her glass.
"I know," Silas said.
"You don't get to know. I never told you."
"You left at five in the morning without your spare key, Rory. You tell people things in the manner of your leaving." He straightened with some effort. "I was angry. Not at the refusal. You were right to refuse. I shouldn't have asked you then, with Eva barely cold in the ground and you sleeping three hours a night. I asked because I was short-handed and because you were good, and because at my age one mistakes those for sufficient reasons. I have had four years to phrase that better. That is the phrasing."
She had prepared for accusation, for coldness, for the polished indifference he could do better than anyone. Admission disarmed the speech she had built. Her eyes stung and she resented it, the old quick tears she had trained out of herself in robing rooms and client cells.
"I should have rung," she said. "Every month I should have, and then the not ringing became the thing I would have to explain first, and then it was a year, and then Mum. I'm sorry. Not the note version. This one."
He considered her for a long moment. Then he reached below the bar and brought out a bottle of the whisky she used to steal in measures too small, she had believed, to notice . He poured one finger into a clean glass and set it beside her tonic, not pushing it toward her, just making it available.
"One," he said. "For the cellist's predecessor. She was late with rent and impossible company when she was frightened, which was often, and I have missed her considerably."
Rory wrapped her hand around the whisky. The smell rose, peat and honey, and with it the back room, the flat stairs, rain on the green sign, her whole lost London.
"I'm here until Friday," she said.
"I know. Your father's admin is relentless." He picked up his page again, then put it down. "Come for supper tomorrow. Early. The knee objects to late nights now, and I object to its objections in company. You can tell me about the case, and leave out whatever the court would prefer you left out."
"Will you tell me about the glasses?"
"Only if you want to be depressed."
She drank. The whisky burned cleanly. When she set the glass down, Silas was watching the door, where more people were coming in out of the rain, shaking water from their coats, filling the Nest with noise and steam and present tense. He moved down the bar to serve them, limp and all, ring flashing as he reached for a glass. Rory stayed on her stool with her bag still packed beside her and did not, for once, stand up while staying was still difficult.