“Door-to-door fighting.” Lillian looked down at her hands, watched their clasped stillness and imagined making fists. Then she looked up again, so she could deliver it professionally. “They tried to kill her quietly and she turned it into a brawl.”

When Cyril smiled, his dry lips split. “Yes. That sounds about right.”

Lillian let herself stop at Grafton’s before she went home. No one would grudge her a drink, after that. Surely.

The place was a Staunton Street institution. When her father was in the corps, and when he was at home, it was where he did his drinking and a fair amount of his diplomacy. There was no sign on the door—how anyone knew to call it Grafton’s was a mystery. Perhaps that wasn’t even its name. She didn’t know what it had been under the Ospies, but it was hardly worse for the wear. Unlike some things.

She was a little leery, going in, but the clientele was nothing if not discreet. If they wanted to judge her, they would do it silently as long as she was within earshot. And anyway, it would hardly be busy at this time. Grafton’s was strictly a lunch and after-hours haunt, and when she arrived the low sky was still the color of white laundry washed accidentally with indigo. The days were growing discernibly longer, just.

Several serious drinkers in suits had their heads together over fans of paper spread where they could catch the last of the winter light through the large front windows. One woman, alone on a leather sofa, read an official-looking folio. Half a soggy sandwich sat forgotten in front of her. The place wasn’t well known for its food, but it often did in a pinch for the busiest residents of Embassy Row.

Homesickness gripped Lillian like a seizure. Absurd. She was less than half a mile from the house where she’d spent half her childhood. But suddenly Grafton’s seemed like the only thing that hadn’t changed beyond recognition. Lillian turned slowly to drink it in, heart wrung tight as a dish towel.

In the quiet, to the rhythm of a waltz on the wireless, the bartender polished glasses with a white cloth. Just past her working elbow, slouched over a martini, was Aristide Makricosta.

Lillian hadn’t seen him since he left Damesfort after Solstice, hadn’t spoken to him since she let the receiver fall back into its cradle still buzzing with his fury. Had hardly given him a second thought, except to curse his name each night before she went to bed, for bringing her brother back to Gedda wrapped in a nice neat cashmere package for the press and everyone to tear apart.

She paused inside the doorway, the bell still ringing behind her. No one looked up except the bartender, who gestured with the glass in her hand, leaving the empty seats to Lillian’s discretion.