AI
The glass slipped from Rory's fingers and hit the bar top with a crack that silenced the nearest table.
"Leave it." Silas reached across with a towel before she could move. "Third one this week."
"Dock my rent."
"I dock your rent every time you break something, there won't be a rent left." He swept the shards into a neat pile, his silver signet ring catching the low light. "Sit down. You're off the clock."
She hadn't been on the clock. She'd been restocking the bourbon shelf because the new girl, Priya, had organised the bottles alphabetically instead of by region, and because keeping her hands busy kept her head quiet. The Raven's Nest hummed with its usual Thursday crowd, a mix of media types from Wardour Street and the odd lost tourist who'd wandered past the green neon sign expecting craft cocktails and exposed brick. They got old maps on dark walls, black-and-white photographs of places nobody recognised, and Silas, who poured generous measures and remembered your name after one visit.
Rory settled onto a stool at the far end of the bar. Silas slid her a whiskey without asking, the good stuff he kept below the counter.
"Brendan called again," he said.
"And you answered again."
"The man's persistent. Runs in the family."
"The man's a barrister. Persistence is billable." She took a sip and let the burn settle. Her father's calls had increased since September. Three a week now, always to Silas, never to her mobile. Brendan Carter understood angles. He knew she wouldn't hang up on someone else's phone.
The door swung open. Cold air knifed through the room, sharpening the smell of spilt ale and wood polish. A woman stepped in, tall, wrapped in a charcoal wool coat that cost more than Rory's monthly take from Golden Empress. Dark auburn hair pulled into something architectural. Heels that clicked against the sticky floor with a confidence that bordered on defiance.
Rory's whiskey stopped halfway to her mouth.
The woman scanned the room the way people do when they're meeting someone, chin up, eyes moving left to right in quick dismissive sweeps. Her gaze passed over Rory, continued to the far wall, then snapped back like a rubber band.
Neither of them moved for three full seconds.
"Rory?"
That voice. Softer than she remembered, stripped of the Cardiff lilt it used to wear like a badge. Rory set her glass down.
"Meg."
Megan Howell crossed the room in four strides. Up close, the changes multiplied. Sharper cheekbones. A thin gold chain at her throat with a pendant Rory didn't recognise, something that looked like a firm logo . Subtle work around the eyes, the kind that costs enough to look like nothing at all. But the freckles were still there, scattered across the bridge of her nose, impossible to buy or remove.
"My God." Meg gripped her shoulders, pulled back, studied her. "Four years?"
"Five in March."
"Five." Meg exhaled the word like smoke. She slid onto the adjacent stool without being invited, shed her coat to reveal a slate-grey blouse with buttons that caught the dim light. "You look..."
"Employed?"
"I was going to say different."
"Same thing."
Silas appeared with surgical timing. Meg ordered a gin and tonic without looking at him, her eyes still fixed on Rory with that particular intensity she used to bring to mock trials. Silas poured the drink, set it down, and retreated to the other end of the bar, where he busied himself with glasses that didn't need polishing.
"I didn't know you were in London," Meg said.
"Couple of years now."
"Doing what?"
"Bit of everything." Rory traced the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb. An old habit. "You?"
"Wexler Graves. Corporate division." Meg said it the way people say things they've rehearsed in mirrors, casual enough to seem unrehearsed. "Junior partner as of last month."
"Junior partner at thirty."
"Twenty-nine. Birthday's not till April."
"Right."
Silence pooled between them. The jukebox in the corner switched tracks, something slow and brassy that filled the gap without fixing it. Meg turned her gin glass a quarter rotation.
"I looked for you, after you left Cardiff. Rang your mum. She said you needed space."
"Mum's diplomatic that way."
"Eva wouldn't tell me anything either. Kept saying you were sorting things out." Meg's fingers tightened around her glass. "I heard about Evan, eventually. Through Louise. She ran into his sister at some wedding in Swansea."
The name landed in Rory's chest like a stone dropped into still water. She watched the ripples spread. Took a drink.
"Old news."
"Is it?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you vanished, Rory. Middle of second year, top of the cohort, Professor Hadley already talking about pupillage, and you just, what, evaporated? No goodbye. No forwarding address. Nothing."
"I sent you a text."
"'Going away for a bit. Don't worry.' That's not a goodbye, that's a weather report."
Rory let the accusation sit. Meg had earned it. They'd shared a flat in Cathays for eighteen months, survived Tort Law and Meg's cooking and that horrific night they'd tried to wallpaper the bathroom at two in the morning after splitting a bottle of Prosecco. Meg had held her hair back when she was sick. Rory had proofread every one of Meg's essays, even the ones about maritime disputes that read like instruction manuals.
"I wasn't in a position to explain."
"You were in a position to leave."
"Those were the same position."
Meg's jaw tightened. She flagged Silas for another gin. He brought the bottle.
"Help yourselves," he said, and the slight limp in his left leg punctuated his retreat.
Meg poured her own drink, a generous measure that contradicted the polished exterior. She drank half of it before speaking again, and when she did, the corporate sheen had thinned.
"Louise told me about the hospital visit. The one after the party at Marcus 's flat."
"Louise talks too much."
"Louise cried when she told me. Proper cried. In a Pret A Manger at half eleven on a Tuesday." Meg's voice had dropped. "We sat across from each other and she told me about the bruises and I kept thinking, why didn't I see it? I was in the next room, Rory. Literally the next room."
"He was careful."
"I should have been more careful."
"That's not how it works."
"Don't tell me how it works. I had three cases last quarter, domestic violence crossovers into corporate fraud. Hiding assets, shell companies, the whole architecture of control. I know exactly how it works. And I still missed it when it was six feet from my bedroom door."
The pub noise had receded, or Rory's hearing had narrowed. The two of them existed in a pocket of compressed air, old wounds exposed to bar light and the smell of hops.
"You couldn't have known."
"You could have told me."
"And said what? Hey Meg, between Hadley's Constitutional Law seminar and that thing at the student union, my boyfriend fractured my wrist and told me I tripped on the stairs?"
The scar caught the light. Meg stared at it.
"That's not from a childhood accident."
"No."
"Your mum told me it was."
"My mum tells a lot of stories. It's the Welsh teacher in her."
Meg pressed her palms flat on the bar. Her nails were perfect ovals, painted something neutral and expensive. Rory remembered when those hands had ink stains and chipped polish and a silver ring from a market stall in the Cardiff Arcades.
"I made junior partner," Meg said.
"You mentioned."
"I eat lunch at my desk. I bill ninety hours a week. I own a flat in Canary Wharf that I sleep in maybe four nights out of seven. I haven't cooked a meal since, God, since that risotto I burned at your birthday. Remember?"
"You set off every smoke alarm in the building."
"The fire brigade came. That one fireman gave me his number."
"You lost it."
"I framed it. It's still on my desk at the flat." A ghost of a smile. "Point is, I did everything right. Took every rung. Hit every mark. And I still feel like I'm running from something, only I can't name it because I never stayed still long enough to look."
The jukebox ran out of songs. In the gap, someone laughed at a table near the door, and the sound was jarring , a colour that didn't belong in the painting.
"You didn't come here looking for me," Rory said.
"I came to meet a client. Hedge fund type. Wanted somewhere 'authentic.'" Meg's fingers drew quotation marks. "He never showed."
"His loss."
"And then I walk in and there you are. Five years. Sat at the end of a bar in Soho like you've been waiting."
"I wasn't waiting."
"No. You were hiding." Meg said it without cruelty, the way a surgeon names what she's found. "Same as me, just with less square footage."
Rory finished her whiskey. The glass was warm in her hand.
"I'm not hiding."
"You're delivering food and living above a pub."
"I'm delivering food and living above a pub, and nobody hits me, and I sleep through the night, and I can leave whenever I want without explaining where I'm going. Don't measure my life against yours, Meg. Your yardstick doesn't fit."
Meg's composure cracked, a fracture line running from her eyes down to her mouth. She opened her lips to speak and nothing came out. She closed them. Tried again.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You got where you wanted to go."
"I got where I was told to go. There's a difference." Meg reached for her coat. Stopped. Her hand hovered over the charcoal wool. "Have dinner with me."
"It's eleven o'clock."
"Breakfast, then. Tomorrow. There's a café on Greek Street, the one with the terrible murals."
"I know it."
"Seven thirty. I have court at nine."
"Meg."
"Please."
The word hung between them, stripped of lawyerly armour, naked as those freckles on her nose. Rory looked at her, this woman she'd once known so well she could predict which mug she'd reach for in the morning, who now wore a stranger's wardrobe and spoke with a stranger's accent but still said "please" like a girl from the Valleys.
"Seven thirty."
Meg exhaled. She pulled on her coat, buttoned it, hesitated, then leaned in and pressed her lips to Rory's temple. The gesture lasted half a second and carried the weight of five absent years.
"Greek Street," Meg said from the door. "Don't evaporate."
The green neon sign washed her silhouette in cold light, and she was gone .
Silas materialised with the whiskey bottle. He leaned against the bar and refilled her glass, his hazel eyes carrying a question he was too well-trained to ask.
"Old friend," Rory said.
"Gathered that. She left her scarf."
A thin cashmere thing, ink-blue, draped across the back of the stool. Rory picked it up. It smelled like expensive perfume and the ghost of cigarettes, a habit Meg had sworn she'd kicked in second year.
The bookshelf at the back of the bar caught her eye, the one that wasn't a bookshelf, the one she wasn't supposed to know about. Silas followed her gaze and his hand went to his signet ring, an old tell he'd never trained away.
"Something on your mind?"
"Wexler Graves." Rory folded the scarf into a neat square. "Corporate division. You know the name?"
Silas didn't blink. He picked up his towel, draped it over his shoulder, and reached for a glass.
"Finish your drink, Rory."
"That's not a no."
His hand stopped on the glass. The photographs on the walls seemed to lean in, those nameless faces in nameless cities, frozen in moments that meant something to someone who'd never explain.
"No," he said. "It isn't."