AI Rain had worked its way inside Rory’s collar somewhere between Golden Empress and Soho Square. By the time she pushed into the Raven’s Nest, the shoulders of her delivery jacket were dark with it and Yu-Fei’s chilli oil had perfumed the whole bag. The green neon above the entrance trembled in the window; beyond the glass, Soho shone like something freshly spilled.
Only four customers remained. Two men argued quietly over a chessboard with three pieces missing, and a woman sat alone at the bar. Silas stood behind it, drying a wineglass with more attention than it deserved. His silver signet clicked against the stem.
“There’s soup,” he said.
“There’s always soup.”
“Because you never eat it.”
Rory set the delivery bag on the floor. “Upstairs. I just want to stop dripping on your floor first.”
“The floor has survived worse.”
The woman at the bar turned her head.
She was no one Rory knew. That was her first thought, and it came with a small, clean relief. The woman wore a charcoal coat over a dark blue dress, both of them dry, both of them beautifully cut. Her hair, once an unruly orange-red that had made elderly women stare at her on Cardiff buses, was brown now, smooth and tucked behind one ear. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands folded around a glass of soda water.
Then she moved the glass aside and began tearing the corner of a cocktail napkin into narrow strips.
Rory had watched her do that through sixth-form examinations, through wet summers on café tables, through one catastrophic New Year’s Eve when they had both sworn they would never speak to each other again and had been sharing chips by midnight.
“Rory?”
Eva’s voice had changed too. The Cardiff was still in it, but the corners had been taken off.
“Hello, Eva.”
Eva rose so quickly that her knee struck the bar. For an instant her arms lifted, and Rory felt her own body prepare for the old collision: Eva’s chin on her shoulder, the painful embrace, some comment about Rory being too bony or too short or insufficiently pleased to see her. Then Eva lowered her arms.
“You look—”
“Wet,” Rory said.
“I was going to say well.”
“You should start with wet. It’s easier to prove.”
A ghost of the old smile crossed Eva’s mouth. She did not sit again. Neither did Rory.
Silas placed a second wineglass on the bar, considered them both, and replaced it with a tumbler of water.
“Eva,” Rory said, because something seemed required. “This is Silas. He owns the bar. Silas, Eva.”
“An old friend,” Silas said. It was not quite a question.
“Very old,” Eva replied. “Practically archaeological.”
He nodded. His hazel eyes rested on Rory for a moment, offering nothing but an exit if she wanted one. Then he took his cloth and his limp to the other end of the bar.
Eva looked at the delivery bag. “Do you work here?”
“Upstairs. I live there. Work’s a few streets away.”
“Of course.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Only that I spent a year imagining you in a glass office with a fern.”
“I kill ferns.”
“I know. I imagined someone else watering it.”
Rory sat. After a moment, Eva did too, leaving a few inches more between them than the stools required. Up close, the change in her was not so much a matter of age. Rory had expected age. She had imagined faint lines, perhaps a different haircut. It was the deliberateness that made her strange. Eva had once entered every room as though following an argument . Now she seemed to ask permission of the furniture.
“You’re a solicitor,” Rory said.
Eva glanced down at herself. “Is it that obvious?”
“You look like my father’s idea of a good outcome.”
This time the smile stayed longer. “Property. Bristol, mostly. I qualified last spring.”
“You wanted to take photographs.”
“I still take photographs.”
“Of what?”
“Mostly drainage.”
Rory laughed before she could decide not to. Eva looked down at her glass, pleased and a little shy.
“And you?” she asked.
“Delivery. Some shifts here when Silas needs someone who can tell a drunk man he’s being an idiot without making it a whole event.”
“You always were gifted.”
“It pays the rent.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
But Eva had meant something, or Rory had heard something, and both of them sat with the impossibility of telling which. On the wall behind Eva hung an old map of the Welsh coast, its colours faded to tobacco and ash. A black-and-white photograph beside it showed three men standing outside a shop that no longer existed. They all looked certain the camera would remember them correctly.
Eva said, “My hotel’s around the corner. The bar was full of people from the conference, so I walked. I liked the sign.”
“The sign’s temperamental.”
“So are you.”
Rory looked at her.
“Sorry,” Eva said. “Old habit.”
“Which one?”
“Thinking I know you.”
The rain ticked against the window. Silas had begun polishing glasses that were already clean.
Eva turned her soda water once in her hands. “You don’t drink?”
“Not much.”
“Me neither. Not at all, actually.”
Rory tried to imagine it: Eva without a bottle in one hand, without the dangerous glitter she used to get around midnight, when every plan seemed not only possible but personally owed to her .
“When?”
“Three years ago.” Eva gave a small shrug. “There wasn’t one dramatic morning. I know people prefer that. I just got tired of being apologised to by myself.”
Rory’s thumb found the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. Its pale curve was almost hidden beneath the cuff of her jacket. Eva noticed the movement; she had always noticed too much.
“How’s your mother?” Rory asked, and immediately understood from Eva’s stillness that she had made a mistake.
“She died. Two years ago.”
The bar did not go quiet. The chess players continued their low dispute, and somewhere in the kitchen a extractor fan rattled. But Rory felt a silence pass through the space she and Eva had been trying so carefully to keep manageable.
“I didn’t know.”
“No.”
“Eva, I’m sorry.”
Eva nodded. She had torn the napkin all the way to its centre now. The white strips lay side by side on the dark wood.
“At the funeral,” she said, “I looked at the door whenever it opened. Not because I thought you’d come. I told myself that later, but at the time I just looked.”
Rory remembered Eva’s father’s funeral, the two of them seventeen in a church hall that smelled of instant coffee and damp wool. Eva had begun laughing during the first hymn, a terrible, breathless sound, and Rory had pinched the inside of her wrist until she stopped. Afterwards they had sat beneath a table with a plate of custard creams, taking turns to say outrageous things until Eva could breathe.
“I would have come,” Rory said.
Eva’s expression was gentle, which made it worse. “You didn’t know.”
“No.”
“And you might not have.”
Rory could have defended herself. Instead she said, “No.”
For the first time, Eva looked away.
Silas moved through a door at the back. A moment later the chess players stood, put on their coats and continued their argument into the street. The green sign flickered over their heads as they left.
Eva said, “You stayed with me for three weeks.”
“I remember.”
“Your key was on the table. You’d made the bed and taken out the rubbish.”
“I didn’t want you to come home to a mess.”
“I came home and sat on the kitchen floor.”
Rory stared into her water. There was a small chip in the tumbler’s rim.
“I thought about calling,” she said.
“When?”
“At first, every day. Then once a week. Then on your birthday. Then it had been so long that calling felt like another thing I’d have to explain.”
“You could have sent a postcard.”
“Yes.”
“Just a postcard. You could have drawn a rude picture on it.”
“I know.”
Eva’s voice did not rise. That, more than anything, showed how much time had passed. The old Eva would have been standing by now, attracting the attention of strangers, making a bright blaze out of whatever hurt her. This Eva pressed her fingertips together and waited for the pain to become speakable.
“You sent me the train fare,” Rory said.
“You paid it back.”
“I paid back the money.”
Eva closed her eyes briefly.
When Rory had finally left Evan, there had been a single rucksack, a wet platform in Cardiff and Eva’s message glowing on her cracked phone screen: Don’t pack anything else. Just get on the train. Eva had met her at Paddington wearing pyjama bottoms beneath her coat. She had taken Rory’s bag, sworn at the ticket barrier and held her hand all the way to the bus.
For three weeks after that, she had answered Rory’s telephone, spoken to Rory’s father, made appointments and written lists. She had put food where Rory could see it and taken it away, untouched, without comment. She had slept on the floor beside the sofa on the nights Rory woke frightened. She had saved her, if saving was a thing one person could do for another.
Then she had begun to say, When you’re yourself again.
“You kept trying to get the old Rory back,” Rory said.
“I thought you wanted that too.”
“Which one?”
“The one who laughed. The one who wanted things.”
“I want things.”
“What?”
“A dry collar. Six hours’ sleep. Yu-Fei to stop giving me noodles I didn’t order.”
Eva’s mouth tightened. “You know what I mean.”
“The old Rory stayed with Evan for a year because she didn’t want to make a scene. She was very good at wanting what other people wanted.”
“That wasn’t all she was.”
“No. But you can’t just order the parts you miss.”
Eva absorbed this with a slight movement of her head, as though avoiding a blow she had decided to permit .
“I was frightened,” she said. “Evan kept calling. Your father kept calling. You flinched when the letterbox opened. I thought if I stopped organising everything for one minute, something terrible would happen.”
“Something terrible had already happened.”
“I know that now.”
Rory heard how harsh she sounded. She had not come downstairs intending to be cruel. Perhaps cruelty was simply what remained when a truth had been kept too long in a small space.
“You got me out,” she said more quietly . “I never said you didn’t.”
“But you hated me.”
“For a while.” Rory turned the chipped glass so the damaged edge faced away. “It was easier than missing you.”
Eva looked at her then. There was no triumph in it, no relief that Rory could see. Only exhaustion.
“I kept your coat for a year,” she said. “That green one with the stupid toggles. Then I gave it to a charity shop because I was angry at it.”
“It was a good coat.”
“It was a hideous coat.”
“You bought it for me.”
“I had appalling taste.”
Something loosened in Rory’s chest, not enough to be called forgiveness, but enough to let air around the old shape of things .
“I still have the mug,” she said.
Eva frowned. “What mug?”
“The blue one. World’s Okayest Sister.”
“You hated that mug.”
“I did.”
“It was supposed to be ironic.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No,” Eva said. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
They sat without speaking. Silas returned carrying his ledger, took in their faces and began to occupy himself with a shelf of bottles. He had an old operative’s gift for making his presence optional.
Eva said, “After Mam died, I went back to Cardiff for a while. Then Bristol offered me the training contract. I thought becoming sensible would feel like making a decision. Mostly it felt like getting tired.”
“Do you like it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Photographs of drainage?”
“There’s a surprising amount of feeling in drainage.”
Rory smiled. “There’s the van, though.”
Eva’s face changed. At nineteen she had been determined to buy a wrecked camper van and drive it through France, photographing people’s hands. She had planned the route on a stolen road atlas. Neither of them had possessed enough money for petrol, let alone the van, but for one summer the plan had made the future seem like a place they could enter by force.
“I still think about the van,” Eva said. “Usually during partnership meetings.”
“Buy one.”
“I have a parking permit.”
“Tragic.”
“It really is.”
Her laugh was lower than Rory remembered. It faded quickly , but not before Rory saw the old Eva move briefly beneath the composed surface, not imprisoned there exactly, just no longer in charge.
Eva reached into her bag and took out a purse. “Can I give you my number?”
Rory’s first impulse was to say that she was nearly always working. Her second was to say that numbers did not mean much; she had changed hers before. Neither was quite true enough to be worth the damage.
She pulled a receipt from her delivery bag, smoothed it against the bar and wrote her own number beneath a list of Yu-Fei’s supper orders.
“Sometimes I don’t answer,” she said.
“All right.”
“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t—”
“Rory.” Eva stopped, and Rory watched her choose not to finish whatever sentence had come next. “All right.”
Rory slid the receipt across. Eva folded it once and put it in an inside pocket, not the loose outer one where she kept receipts for expenses.
“I should go,” she said, but made no move toward her coat. “My train’s at six.”
“In the morning?”
“Unfortunately.”
Rory looked at the clock. It was not yet midnight. There were a hundred sensible reasons to let her leave, and none of them seemed urgent .
“Silas makes tea,” she said. “He’ll behave as if it’s a personal insult, but it’s good tea.”
Eva glanced toward the bar. “I don’t want to keep him.”
“He’s deciding whether to inventory the vermouth. You’d be doing him a favour.”
Silas did not look up. “Two teas,” he said.
Eva laughed again. Rory signalled him with two fingers, and he set the ledger aside.
While they waited, Rory told her about Golden Empress: Yu-Fei’s obsession with the thermostat, the customer who ordered steamed fish every Friday and never remembered having met her, the steep back stairs Rory used when it rained. Ordinary things, all of them. Eva listened without turning them into evidence of anything.
“Is the food good?” she asked.
“Very.”
“What should I order?”
“The aubergine. Ask for it without coriander.”
“I like coriander now.”
Rory stared at her. “God. You really have changed.”
Eva laughed, and after a second Rory did too. The sound was lower than she remembered. She liked it better once she stopped trying to recognise it.