AI The glass slipped from Rory's fingers and hit the bar top with a crack that silenced the nearest stools. Gin pooled across the lacquered wood, bleeding toward a stack of beer mats.
"Rory Carter. Jesus Christ."
She knew the voice before she turned. That particular way of stretching vowels, the faint Norfolk lilt buried under years of London polish. She hadn't heard it in, what, six years? Seven? And yet her body remembered it the way a dog remembers a hand that once fed it.
"Marcus ."
He stood three feet away in a charcoal suit that cost more than her rent. The Marcus Hale she'd known at Cardiff had worn band shirts with holes in the armpits, had eaten cold baked beans from the tin at two in the morning while ranting about Foucault. This man had cufflinks. Actual cufflinks, silver, catching the dim light of The Raven's Nest like small accusatory eyes.
"Seven years," he said.
"Six and a half."
"You're counting." He smiled, and there it was, the ghost of who he'd been. A flicker . Gone.
Behind the bar, Silas limped past with a tray of clean glasses, his silver signet ring clinking against the stems. He glanced at Rory, then at Marcus , and said nothing. Silas had a talent for reading rooms the way other people read newspapers.
"Let me buy you another." Marcus nodded at the spilled gin. "Whatever that was."
"Hendrick's. Tonic. Cucumber."
"Still?"
"Some things don't change."
He caught Silas's eye with the ease of someone accustomed to being noticed . Rory watched him order, two Hendrick's, neat pour, the cucumber sliced not quartered, and she catalogued the differences. The jaw had sharpened. He'd lost the softness around his middle. His hair, once a chaotic sprawl of brown curls, sat cropped close, disciplined. Even his hands looked different, manicured, deliberate.
"You look well," she said, which meant nothing .
"I look different. You can say it."
She took the fresh glass Silas placed before her, nodded her thanks.
"Alright. You look different."
"Mergers and acquisitions." He said it the way someone might confess to a minor crime. "Chadwick Montrose. You know them?"
"Should I?"
"No. Probably not." He drank. "And you?"
"Delivery driver."
A pause. She felt it land, felt the recalibration behind his eyes. Marcus had always been transparent that way, his thoughts arriving on his face a half-second before he could suppress them. That much, at least, hadn't changed.
"Right."
"For a Chinese restaurant. The Golden Empress, round the corner."
"Good food?"
"Best char siu in Soho. Yu-Fei doesn't mess about."
Another pause. The old maps on the walls seemed to press inward. A black-and-white photograph of some forgotten dock scene hung crooked above Marcus 's left shoulder, and Rory focused on it because focusing on his face required more energy than she had.
"I looked for you," he said. "After you left Cardiff. Eva told me you'd gone to London, but she wouldn't say where exactly. Protective, that one."
"That's Eva."
"I rang your mum once. Jennifer."
"She didn't mention it."
"She told me you were fine and that fine meant I should stop ringing."
Rory traced the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb. Old habit. "Mum's good at subtext."
"Is this about Evan?"
The name landed between them like a stone dropped into still water. Around them, The Raven's Nest hummed with its usual trade. A couple argued about holiday plans near the door. Someone fed the jukebox, and Tom Waits growled through speakers that had seen better decades. The green neon from the sign outside bled through the frosted windows and painted everything in a sickly, beautiful light.
"Not everything's about Evan."
"It was when I knew you."
"You knew me when I was twenty. People at twenty are drafts, Marcus . Rough outlines."
"And now?"
She held up the gin. "Final edit."
He didn't laugh. She hadn't expected him to, not really . The Marcus she'd known would have. He would have thrown his head back, shown all his teeth, slapped the bar. This Marcus just nodded, like she'd confirmed something on a spreadsheet.
"I should have been there," he said.
"Where?"
"When things were bad. With him. I should have done something."
"What would you have done?"
"I don't know. Something."
"That's the problem with something. Never specific enough to be useful."
His grip tightened around his glass. She watched the tendons in his hand shift, the skin whitening across his knuckles. The cufflinks caught the light again.
"I saw him," Marcus said. "Evan. Last year. Corporate event in Bristol. He's in property development now. Had a woman on his arm, blonde, young. Laughing at everything he said."
Rory's stomach turned. She set the gin down.
"He came over to me at the bar. Shook my hand. Asked about old times. Like none of it happened."
"That's his gift."
"I wanted to put him through the wall."
"But you didn't."
"I shook his hand back. Smiled." Marcus stared into his glass. "Then I went to the toilets and threw up."
Something softened in her chest, a loosening she didn't invite. She pushed it down.
"We were in the same seminar for two years," Marcus said. "Constitutional Law. Every Tuesday and Thursday. You sat in the second row, left side. I sat behind you and copied your notes because mine were rubbish."
"They were."
"I watched it happen. The bruises you covered with long sleeves in June. The way you flinched when someone raised their voice. I told myself it wasn't my place. That you'd ask for help if you needed it."
"Marcus ."
"I told myself that because it was easier than doing something difficult."
Silas drifted past again, wiping the bar in slow circles. His hazel eyes met Rory's for a fraction of a second. A question in them. She gave the smallest shake of her head.
"You want absolution," she said. "That's why you're telling me this."
"I want you to know I'm sorry."
"Noted."
"Rory."
"What do you want me to say? It's fine? Water under the bridge? That your guilt, which you've been carrying around like a good little Catholic boy, is hereby forgiven by the woman who actually lived through it?"
The couple by the door had stopped arguing. Tom Waits had given way to silence between tracks. Marcus 's jaw worked, the muscle pulsing beneath clean-shaven skin.
"No," he said. "I don't want you to say that."
"Good. Because I can't."
She picked up her gin again. Drank. The botanical bite anchored her.
"The suit's nice, by the way," she said, after a long moment. "Chadwick Montrose treating you well?"
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Deflect. You always did that. Change the subject, make a joke, move the conversation somewhere safe."
"Safe's underrated."
"You dropped out three months before finals. Your dad, Brendan, he'd already booked the restaurant for your graduation. Did you know that? He told me when I rang looking for you. He said, she was going to be a barrister. She would have been brilliant."
Rory's throat closed. She set the glass down with care, aligning it precisely on the bar mat, because precision was the only thing holding her together.
"Don't bring my dad into this."
"He's proud of you. He told me that too."
"Marcus , I swear to God."
"He said, tell her I'm proud if you find her."
She blinked. The green neon swam. She pressed her thumb harder into the scar on her wrist until the pain clarified things.
"That was seven years ago."
"Six and a half. You're counting, remember?"
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The jukebox kicked back in, some blues number with too much bass. A group of students tumbled through the front door, trailing cold air and laughter. Normal life, filling the gaps.
"I deliver food on a bicycle," Rory said. "I live upstairs." She pointed at the ceiling. "I read law textbooks sometimes, at night, like some people read romance novels. For the fantasy of it."
"Come back."
"To what?"
"Finish your degree. I know people at King's College. Mature student programmes. I could make a call."
"With your mergers and acquisitions contacts."
"With my I-owe-you-more-than-a-phone-call contacts."
She studied him. The suit, the cufflinks, the disciplined hair. Somewhere underneath all of it, the boy who'd eaten cold beans and argued about power structures at two in the morning. She wondered which version was the costume.
"You changed," she said.
"Everyone does."
"Not like this. You used to talk about burning the system down. Now you wear it."
His hand went to his cufflink, touched it once, dropped away. "The system pays well. And it turns out burning things down is less romantic when you can't afford the matches."
"That's the saddest thing you've ever said to me."
"Give it time."
Silas appeared at the end of the bar, polishing a glass with the deliberate patience of a man who'd spent decades waiting for assets to come in from the cold. He caught Rory's eye again and tilted his head toward the back of the bar, toward the bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf.
"Friend of yours?" Marcus glanced at Silas.
"Landlord."
"Seems like more than that."
"Most things are."
Marcus reached into his jacket and produced a business card, cream-coloured, embossed. He placed it on the bar between them.
"My direct line. Personal mobile on the back."
"Mergers and acquisitions."
"And old debts."
She didn't pick it up. Didn't push it away either.
"I should go," Marcus said. He straightened his jacket, a gesture so practiced it looked mechanical . "Client dinner in Mayfair. The kind where they serve foam on things that shouldn't have foam."
"Sounds dire."
"It is." He paused, one hand on the bar. "You would have been brilliant, Rory. Your dad was right."
"Would have been. That's the part that stings."
He held her gaze. For three seconds, maybe four, the mask slipped and she saw him, the real him, the frightened boy who'd watched something terrible happen to his friend and done nothing and would carry that nothing like a tumour for the rest of his manicured, cufflinked, foam-dinner life.
Then the mask reset. He nodded once, turned, and walked toward the door.
Rory watched him go. The business card sat on the bar, absorbing a ring of condensation from her glass. She pressed her thumb to the scar one final time.
"Silas."
He materialised at her elbow. The signet ring clinked against the bar top.
"That bookshelf of yours. The one that isn't a bookshelf."
His eyebrows lifted a fraction.
"I need to use the room behind it." She picked up the business card, turned it over. The personal number was written in blue ink, slightly uneven. Human. "And I need you to run a name for me. Marcus Hale. Chadwick Montrose."
Silas studied her face for a long moment. Then he reached beneath the bar and she heard the soft mechanical click of a hidden latch releasing.
"After you," he said.