AI For eight months, Rory had relied on the size of London.
It was large enough to misplace a person in. Large enough that she could spend an evening carrying paper bags of noodles and roast duck through streets whose names she never learned, and no one would ask why a Carter from Cardiff with all that reluctant pre-law behind her was counting change on a restaurant counter. At night the city took her in without curiosity. She had mistaken that, for a while, for mercy.
She knew better, of course. Cities did not keep secrets. People did, and generally with less skill than they imagined. Still, the superstition remained useful until a wet Tuesday in November.
She came into the Raven’s Nest just before midnight with rain in her hair and the Golden Empress delivery bag slack against her shoulder. Silas was drying glasses behind the bar, his silver signet ring ticking softly against the stem of each one. The green neon above the door had stained one side of his beard an improbable emerald.
“You’re wet,” he said.
“It has been raining.”
He considered this with the gravity of a man examining an unfamiliar alibi. “Has it?”
Rory dropped the delivery bag by the till and took the towel he offered. Around them, the bar settled into its closing-hour noises: the refrigerator’s tired hum, rain needling the window, a pipe knocking behind the walls. Old maps and black-and-white photographs watched from the gloom . Behind Silas, a map of London showed streets that had ceased to exist before either of them was born.
She had dried her face and was working on the ends of her hair when the door opened.
“Are you still serving?” a woman asked .
The voice reached Rory before the face did. London had smoothed its edges, but Cardiff remained underneath, in the upward turn of the final word.
Eva stood beneath the green sign with water shining on her coat.
At seventeen, she had shaved the hair at her temples and dyed the rest an unconvincing silver. She had worn men’s boots, red lipstick to funerals, and an expression that suggested she was already bored by the excuse you were preparing to give her. Now her hair was dark and cut neatly at her jaw. Her coat was navy. There was a small, careful crease between her brows that Rory did not remember.
The greater change was her stillness. Eva used to enter rooms leaning toward her next opinion. Now she waited just inside the door, taking in the bar without appearing to expect anything from it.
“Rory?”
Rory lowered the towel. “Hello, Eva.”
Silas did not look directly at either of them. That was how Rory knew he had noticed everything.
“I’ll see to the cellar,” he said.
“You did the cellar an hour ago.”
“It’s a demanding cellar.”
He set down the glass and went through the rear door, his slight limp more pronounced on the stairs. Rory considered calling him back. She could think of no reason that would not require an explanation.
Eva gave a small laugh at the sound of the door closing. “Subtle.”
“He has his moments.”
“Is he your landlord?”
“And my employer’s landlord’s friend. It gets complicated.” Rory nodded toward the bar. “I live upstairs.”
“Above the shop.”
“So to speak.”
Eva came farther in but did not sit. Rory’s mind, usually so quick to offer a way around things, produced only the bare geometry of the room: door, window, cellar stairs, the two of them standing with six years between the stools.
“You cut your hair,” Eva said.
“Years ago.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No.”
The word landed more harshly than Rory intended. Eva absorbed it without visible reaction. She unbuttoned her coat, then seemed to think better of staying and buttoned it again.
“Do you want a drink?” Rory asked.
“Tea, if there is any. I’m on an early shift.”
“Shift?”
“Nursing.” Eva’s mouth tightened. “Go on.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You arranged your face.”
Rory went behind the bar and switched on the small kettle Silas kept in the back. “You fainted when I cut my wrist.”
“I was ten. And you were carrying your hand around like something you’d found in the road.”
“I was being calm.”
“You were being unnatural.”
Rory took down two cups. The ordinary actions helped: spoon, tea, the click of the kettle switch. “I thought you hated blood.”
“I hated yours. You never could do anything by halves.”
It was almost easy, for three or four seconds. Then Eva looked around at the delivery bag, the damp towel, the stairs leading to Rory’s flat, and the present assembled itself again.
“So not law,” she said.
“Law survived without me.”
“Your father must be devastated.”
“He’s managing.”
“And your mother?”
“Relieved, though she tries not to sound it.” Rory poured water into the cups. “What about you? Are you at a hospital here?”
“For now. I did my training in Bristol, then came to London. I keep saying I’ll go back to Cardiff.” Eva shrugged. “Dad’s got a dog now. He pretends not to like it and talks to it when he thinks I can’t hear.”
Rory handed her the tea. Eva’s fingers were pale at the tips, with a crescent of antiseptic-stained skin around one nail. Rory wondered when she had begun noticing hands this way: whether they were steady, where they went when a conversation became difficult.
Eva wrapped both of hers around the cup.
“How long have you been in London?” she asked.
Rory could have lied. Not convincingly, perhaps, but enough to alter the next few minutes .
“Since March.”
Eva looked down into her tea. “You rang me in February.”
“Yes.”
“So you got here.”
“Yes.”
Rain moved across the window in a quick, brighter sheet. Somewhere below them, a crate shifted, followed by Silas’s muffled curse.
“I waited at Victoria,” Eva said.
Rory had known she would say it. Knowing did nothing useful.
“I know.”
“You don’t, actually. You weren’t there.”
“No.”
“I had the spare room ready. Well, my room. I was going to take the sofa and be unbearably gracious about it.” Eva attempted a smile, but it vanished before it reached her eyes. “I waited until the arrivals board stopped making sense. Then I went home and told myself you’d changed your mind. Then your mother said you were safe, and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious.”
“You could have been both.”
“I was. I’ve had a great deal of practice since.”
Rory set down her own cup before she dropped it. “I got as far as the station.”
Eva looked at her.
“I couldn’t go out to you,” Rory said. “I sat where no one could see me from the main entrance, and then I got on a bus.”
“Why?”
There were answers that sounded noble in retrospect. Rory disliked all of them.
“Because you would have been kind,” she said. “Or you would have been angry. Either way, you would have known me. You’d have known what I used to be like, and I couldn’t bear anyone making the comparison.”
Eva’s expression changed then, not softening exactly, but losing some of its discipline .
“So you chose a city where nobody knew you.”
“Yes.”
“It was personal to me.”
“I know.”
“Stop agreeing as if that makes it better.”
Rory nodded. The old Eva would have raised her voice. The old Eva would have said the next thing before she had time to regret it. This Eva pressed her thumb against the side of the cup and waited until she could speak quietly.
“You can be angry,” Rory said.
“I am angry. It turns out you can be angry and tired at the same time.”
The kettle clicked as it cooled. Rory looked at Eva’s dark hair, her sensible coat, the new crease between her brows, and felt an unexpected grief for the careless girl who had once thrown a shoe at a police car and then made Rory run three streets with her. She was ashamed of the grief. That carelessness had often been exercised at other people’s expense.
Eva’s gaze dropped to Rory’s left wrist. Her sleeve had ridden up, exposing the small crescent scar.
“Is that still from my wall?”
“Your wall?”
“You said the bricks were loose.”
“You said I wouldn’t climb it.”
“That isn’t an instruction.”
“It was when you said it.”
For the first time, Eva smiled properly. It altered her face so completely that Rory saw, beneath the nurse and the woman in the navy coat, a child with blood on her knees and both hands over her mouth.
“Mam blamed me,” Eva said.
“Your mother blamed everyone. Even the wall.”
“She was very fair that way.”
Rory remembered Eva’s mother at the hospital, feeding coins into a vending machine with shaking hands while pretending the machine had offended her. She remembered the clean tea towel around her wrist and Eva asleep in the corridor, or pretending to be asleep so no one would mention that she had fainted.
“I should have come to the funeral,” Rory said.
Eva’s smile went.
“I meant to write,” Rory continued. “Then too much time passed, and everything I wrote seemed to need an explanation for the delay. And the explanation made it worse.”
“I looked for you,” Eva said. “At the back of the church. Every time the door opened. I hated myself for it. There were other people to think about.”
“Eva—”
“No. You should know that part. You shouldn’t get to make it into something vague where we were both unfortunate and nobody did anything.”
Rory took the words without defending herself. They hurt more cleanly than she had expected.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know.” Eva stared into her cup. After a moment she added, “I’m trying not to use my dead mother to win an argument. She’d have been very good at it.”
“She would.”
“Appallingly good.”
A silence followed, but it was not the same silence as before.
Rory turned her cup between her palms. “You were right about Evan.”
Eva looked up sharply . “Don’t say it as if you owe me the sentence.”
“Perhaps I owe it to myself.”
That stopped her. Eva’s lips parted, then closed.
“I was so certain,” she said at last . “I thought if I could just explain him clearly enough, you’d leave. When you didn’t, I made it your failure. It was easier than admitting I didn’t know how to help.”
“You did help.”
“When you rang, yes.”
“You answered.”
Eva gave a small, helpless shrug. “That mattered?”
“It was the night that mattered.”
She nodded, but her eyes had filled. She seemed annoyed by this and looked away toward the photographs on the wall.
Rory did not move toward her. Once, she would have. Once, affection between them had been physical and unthinking: an arm hooked around a neck, a head dropped onto a shoulder, Eva pulling Rory by the sleeve into some fresh disaster. Now any touch would have to be invented, and Rory did not trust herself with the invention.
“I wanted you to say I’d been right,” Eva said. “For a while. I had whole conversations in my head where you admitted it and I was magnificently generous.”
“You were always generous in your own head.”
“Devastatingly.” Eva wiped beneath one eye with the heel of her hand. “Then you disappeared, and being right became this filthy thing I couldn’t put down.”
Rory thought of the months after Cardiff: learning the routes Yu-Fei preferred, signing the lease on the flat, discovering that a lock could be just a lock and not a question she had to answer. She had built a life out of small, verifiable facts. None of them had made the past smaller. They had only given her somewhere to stand while she looked at it.
“I didn’t want to be the thing you’d been right about,” she said.
Eva was quiet for a moment. “And I didn’t want to find out that being right hadn’t made me useful.”
Rory let out a breath . “We were very busy.”
“Weren’t we?”
“Exhausting, in retrospect.”
Eva laughed. It broke unevenly, but it was laughter. She took her phone from her coat pocket and checked the time.
“I should go,” she said.
Something in Rory contracted. It was not panic, she realised. Only disappointment.
“Where are you staying?”
“About five minutes away. Hospital accommodation. Beige walls, aggressive radiator.” Eva hesitated, then held out the phone. “Put your number in.”
Rory did. Her hands were steady.
Eva read the screen when she returned it. “Aurora Carter. Very formal.”
“You can change it.”
“To what?”
“Delivery-related emergency contact.”
“I’ll think about it.” Eva stood and buttoned her coat. “I might not ring straightaway.”
“All right.”
“You could ring me.”
“I could.”
“But you’re enjoying making this difficult.”
“A little.”
Eva shook her head, though she was smiling again. “There you are.”
At the door, she paused. Green light from the sign lay across her shoulders. Rory wondered what she herself looked like from where Eva stood: whether the years had made her equally unfamiliar, whether there was some obvious alteration she had ceased to notice because she lived inside it.
Eva did not ask for a promise. Rory was grateful for that. She only lifted one hand, briefly, and stepped into the rain.
Silas came up from the cellar a minute later carrying a single bottle, which he placed beneath the bar with exaggerated care.
“Demanding?” Rory asked.
“Emotionally.”
He glanced at the two cups. “Old friend?”
Rory considered how inadequate both words were. “Yes.”
He nodded, as though she had answered a more difficult question, and began wiping a section of the bar that was already clean.
Her phone rested beside her cup with Eva’s name on the screen. Not a childhood nickname. Not an instruction. Just Eva. Rory picked it up and put it in her pocket, then went to lock the door.
Beyond the glass, London went on being immense. For the first time since March, that did not feel like the point.