AI The rain in Soho made everything look as if it were being seen through wet glass. The green neon sign above the entrance of the Raven's Nest threw its colour across the pavement and across the shoulders of everyone who passed underneath it, and by the time Aurora Carter ducked beneath the awning her straight, shoulder-length black hair was plastered to her forehead in dark strands. She was damp through to the skin, five foot six of tired efficiency, the canvas delivery satchel from Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress restaurant still slung across her back, heavy with the smell of soy and foil containers. She had meant to go straight up the side stairs to the flat above the bar, the way she had for almost three years, without setting foot inside the place at all.
The side door was locked. Whoever had been minding the bar in Silas's absence had changed the lock, or Silas himself had, and for a moment she stood in the narrow alley counting her options the way she had taught herself to count exits. Cool-headed was what people called her now. She tested the handle again, felt the rain run down the back of her neck, and thought, in the quick, out-of-the-box way that had always been hers, that the front door would be faster than a wet climb over the bins. She pushed it open.
Inside, the Raven's Nest was dim in the particular way she remembered, low lamps and the smell of old wood and spilled ale, the walls covered with maps whose edges were curling and black-and-white photographs of men in coats she did not know . A jazz record played very quietly from somewhere behind the bar. The place was empty except for the man polishing a glass with a cloth that had clearly already done the job. He did not look up at the bell over the door. He moved to set the glass down on a shelf and his left leg dragged, just slightly , just enough that she saw it, and the silver signet ring he always wore on his right hand caught the light as he turned the glass in his fingers.
It could not be. That was her first, stupid thought. It could not be, because Silas Blackwood had disappeared from this bar, and from her life, three years earlier without a note or a forwarding address, and she had learned not to look for him the way you learn not to look for a door you know is locked.
He looked up then. His eyes were hazel, red-rimmed from the weather or from drink or from something else, and above his neatly trimmed beard, which matched the grey-streaked auburn of his hair, his face was thinner and older than the face she carried in her head. He was still tall, six foot one even when he stooped a little over the bar, but the restless energy that had once made him seem to vibrate in a room had gone.
"Rory," he said. He said it as if he had been practising it. As if he had been saying it to the glass. "Well. That's a sight for sore eyes."
She did not move from just inside the door. The satchel strap cut into her shoulder. "You are supposed to be dead," she said.
"Disappointing, I know ."
"Or in Prague. Or arrested. Eva said—" She stopped. Eva had said a great many things over the years, most of them to get her to come to London in the first place, and none of them had prepared her for this. "Eva said not to wait around for you."
"Wise woman, your Eva." He came around the end of the bar with that dragging step, the old knee injury making his stride uneven, and he stopped a respectful distance away. He was close enough that she could see the new lines at the corners of his eyes. "You look well. The London air agrees with you."
She laughed before she could stop herself, a short sound that she immediately regretted. "I deliver noodles for a living, Si. I live above a bar I am not supposed to be inside of. I am thriving."
He smiled, and the smile altered his face so completely that for a second she was eleven again and he was standing in her parents' kitchen in Cardiff, stealing a biscuit while her mother pretended not to notice. He had been a friend of her father's then, a man who turned up at odd hours with books under his arm and who had taught her chess by making her beat him, who had called her Laila because Aurora had sounded too solemn for a girl who argued with furniture. He had looked then as if he belonged to bright, urgent places, to airports and hotel lobbies and other people's wars. He had never sat still.
"You still deliver for Cheung?" he asked.
"Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress, yes. On a bike with a temperamental gear. It is very glamorous." She shifted the satchel from one shoulder to the other and the movement pulled at the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a childhood accident from a fall on the ice outside her primary school in Cardiff, the sort of scar that had faded to a pale moon and only showed when she was cold. She saw his gaze follow it, briefly, and she flexed her fingers without thinking. She had done that a great deal in the first year after Evan.
"You were supposed to be—" He searched for the word. "Law. I thought you were reading law at Cardiff. Pre-law, your father said."
"I was. Reluctantly. Brendan Carter's daughter was always going to be a barrister, whether she wanted one or not." She said it lightly , because lightness was a kind of armour she had learned to wear. "I left. I did not finish. My mother Jennifer still tells her teachers' union friends that I am on a gap year. It is a very long gap year."
"And Evan?"
The name landed between them like a glass dropped on a hard floor. She felt her shoulders rise. She had not heard it spoken aloud in the Nest before. In the flat upstairs she could pretend the last three years had been a clean start, that London had been a choice and not a flight, that Eva's frantic phone calls after she left Evan had been an invitation and not a rescue. Standing here, with the man who had once promised her father he would keep an eye on her in the big city, the pretence thinned.
"He is in Cardiff," she said. "Or he was. It does not matter now. I left."
"Good." Silas said it simply. There was no surprise in his face. "You were always better at leaving than staying, love. Even when you were a slip of a thing."
"And you were always better at disappearing." The sentence came out sharper than she intended, and for a moment they looked at each other across the narrow space between the bar and the door, two people who had been old friends for most of her life and strangers for the last three years of it. The weight of that was in the air, heavier than the rain. "I have been living above your bar for three years, Si. Paying the rent to a woman who kept saying you would come back for your post. I thought you had sold it. I thought you had— I am sorry. I thought you had died, and I was too cowardly to ask."
"You were not cowardly." He lifted his right hand, the hand with the ring, and then let it fall again. The ring was dull now, not polished. "I left without saying goodbye. That was cowardly. Prague was—" He stopped and looked towards the back wall, towards the row of books that swung inward on a hidden hinge to a back room she had only ever seen once, a room of steel chairs and a telephone that did not ring. "Prague was a botched operation. You know that much from your father. I was MI6, Rory. Field work. I told myself it was a clean retirement. It was not clean. There were inquiries. There were men who wanted statements. I went away to give them what they wanted and to keep it away from here. Away from you."
She remembered him then as he had been on his last visit to the flat, before he went, quick and grey-eyed with exhaustion, packing a single bag in ten minutes, refusing tea. She had been twenty-two then, raw from leaving Evan, from leaving Cardiff and everything that had shamed her there, and she had taken his silence for abandonment because abandonment was a language she already spoke fluently. He had given her the keys to the flat above the Nest as if it were a small thing, as if a roof were a small thing, and she had clung to it.
"You are different," she said, because at last she could say something true without it costing her everything. "You used to— you could not stay in one place for an evening."
"I know ." He gave a small, grim smile. "This place keeps me in one place. Polishing glasses. That is the extent of my espionage now. Maps on the wall for decoration. Photographs of people I knew when I had a full head of hair and no limp to speak of."
"You limp more."
"I do." He glanced down at his left leg, as if surprised to find it still attached. "The knee got worse. Scar tissue. The doctors in Prague— the doctors anywhere, now. They talk about replacement. I tell them I am too old to be replaced." He paused. "I am fifty-eight, Rory. I count it every morning. You were eleven when I first met you. You were all elbows and opinions. You told me my chess was sentimental."
"You let me win."
"I did. You deserved a win."
The record ended and the silence of the bar rushed in. Outside, a bus hissed past in the rain. She became aware, with a clarity that was almost painful, of how much time had passed through both of them. She was no longer the girl who had stormed out of a pre-law lecture at Cardiff University and driven the long, ruinous road to London with Eva's voice in her ears and Evan's last threats in her pocket. She was a woman who could calculate the exact cost of a delivery route and who had trained herself to notice exits in every room, whose bright blue eyes, as her mother used to say, saw too much. And he was no longer the man who had moved through the world as if it were a set built for his convenience. He was a retired operative with a silver ring and a bad knee, tending a bar in Soho that was a front for a network that no longer needed him, listening to jazz records that no one else in the room wanted.
"Are you angry with me?" he asked quietly.
She considered the question with the cool-headed intelligence that was hers, refusing the quick, easy answer that rose to her throat. "I was. For a long time I was angry that you left and that you did not tell me why. I was angry that you gave me a home and then you took yourself away from it. I was angry at Eva for making me come here. I was angry at my father for wanting a barrister for a daughter. It was a very efficient way to be angry at everyone instead of being frightened."
"And now?"
"Now I think you were frightened too." She said it and saw something flicker in his hazel eyes. "You do not stay still unless you are frightened."
He was silent for a long moment. Then he moved, slowly, behind the bar again, and began to fill the kettle. The limp was unmistakable now, each step a small negotiation. He set out two mugs. He did not reach for alcohol. He did not reach for the bookshelf that would have taken them into the back room for a clandestine meeting, the way he might once have done for old times' sake. He stayed in the public part of the bar, in the light, and the restraint told her more than any confession could have about the man he had become.
"Tea," he said. "You look cold."
"I am cold."
"Put that bag down before your shoulder gives out."
She unslung the satchel and let it thump onto a chair. Her wet hair dripped onto the collar of her jacket. She sat, because her legs had decided for her, on the stool he indicated, and he sat opposite her with his bad leg stretched out at an angle, the signet ring tapping lightly against his mug when he moved his hand. They drank tea that was too strong, the way he always made it, and the way she had always pretended to like it when she was young.
"I kept your chess set," she said after a while. "In the flat. Upstairs. It is on the shelf by the window. I have not played in years."
"Play me sometime." It was an offer, tentative, as if he were afraid she would refuse and as if he were afraid she would accept. "If you want. I play badly now. My concentration—"
"You will let me win again."
"I might not be able to help myself."
She looked at him over the rim of her mug and felt the old, unspoken regret rise between them, not as an accusation but as a shared, heavy thing : that he had not been there when she needed a friend who knew where the bodies were buried , literally and otherwise; that she had not called him when Evan had first raised his voice; that years had been spent in the same building, her above and him gone, without either of them quite knowing how to come back to the other. Time had done that. Time had made them strangers who knew each other's scars.
"You are staying?" she asked.
"I am staying." He turned his ring in the wet heat of the mug. "The bar needs a new lock, apparently. And a new manager. I am told I am difficult to replace."
"Careful," she said, and her mouth curved despite herself. "You will end up with a flatmate who argues about chess."
"She already has the flat. I am only borrowing the ground floor."
Outside, the neon sign smeared green across the rain-streaked window of the Raven's Nest, and the two old friends sat in the dim bar with their tea growing cold, neither of them in a hurry now to leave the room.