Greta

The closest thing Ivy had to a friend before any of it, and the only person in the quarter who asks her the question the quarter is built to avoid.

Who she is

Sharp featured and sharper tongued, and she says why she is still here:

GRT: Of course I noticed. I notice everything. It's why I'm still alive and half the others I grew up with aren't. (ch. 226)

She drinks slowly and deliberately, "never quite enough to dull her edges, just enough to soften them".

What she sees

Everyone else in the quarter observes the etiquette of not asking. Greta breaks it on Ivy's first evening back.

GRT: You look different. IVY: I am different. GRT: Then why are you here. (ch. 225)

And again, on the rooftop, harder:

GRT: You used to tell me everything. Or close enough to everything. Now you just sit there thinking about nothing important. IVY: People change. GRT: That's the second time you've said that without explaining what it means.

She has been counting the tells. She names the one that matters:

GRT: You used to be the fastest hands in this quarter. Fastest and least sentimental. Last week you stood outside that window for almost a full minute before going in. That's not the Ivy I remember. IVY: Maybe I'm not her anymore. GRT: Then who are you?

That question runs through ch. 227 and ch. 229 unanswered, and is finally answered in ch. 231 to somebody else.

What she wants

Not for Ivy to leave. The opposite, and on a condition:

GRT: It means people in this quarter don't get the luxury of half measures. You're either all in or you're not, and the in between gets people hurt. Including you.

GRT: I like having you back. I do. But I'd rather have you back as whoever you actually are now than as a worse copy of who you used to be.

She leaves without waiting for an answer. She does not appear again.

Not the Greta of ch. 238

Act 11 opens with a midwife named Greta, and the chapter goes out of its way to disconnect them:

The midwife's name was Greta, though not the Greta this story's older threads might have once known, simply a woman who happened to share a common name with someone else entirely, four centuries and an unrelated life removed. (ch. 238)

That is the saga stating a name collision on the page rather than leaving it to be found. Recorded because it establishes that repeated names in this story are sometimes deliberate and sometimes not, and that the text will say which.