AI # Chapter Seven
The woman at the bar had Rory's old laugh.
Not the one Rory used now, the careful, measured chuckle she deployed when Silas made a dry remark about the health inspector. This was the full-throated, head-thrown-back laugh that used to echo through the Cardiff University library stacks until the librarian threatened them both with permanent exile.
Rory nearly dropped the tray of empties.
She caught herself, balanced the pint glasses with the muscle memory of someone who'd been doing this three months too long, and looked again. The woman sat three stools from the end, nursing something amber in a tumbler, her auburn hair now cut in a sharp bob that framed a face Rory knew better than her own reflection used to show.
Cara Dunne.
Cara bloody Dunne, laughing at something the man beside her had said, her rings catching the green neon wash from the entrance sign. She wore a tailored blazer the colour of wet slate, and the kind of understated jewellery that whispered rather than shouted money. The last time Rory had seen her, Cara had been wearing a borrowed jumper with a cigarette burn on the sleeve, helping her pack a duffel bag at three in the morning.
Rory stacked the glasses on the bar's service end and wiped her palms on her apron. Silas glanced at her from the far corner where he was polishing a glass with the reverence of a man performing surgery.
"Something wrong?"
"Nothing."
She picked up the next delivery order from the counter, a bag of takeaway containers still warm from Yu-Fei's kitchen. The address was only three streets away. She could walk it, drop it off, come back, and Cara would be gone. People like Cara didn't linger in places like this. They passed through, stopping only long enough to remind you of everything you'd left behind.
"Rory." Silas had that tone again, the one that meant he'd already read the situation and was waiting for her to catch up. His hazel eyes flicked toward the woman at the bar.
"Old friend," Rory said.
"Old friends are the most dangerous kind."
She almost laughed at that, almost used the new laugh, but the old one threatened to crack through instead. She grabbed the takeaway bag and moved toward the door, keeping her head down, her black hair falling like a curtain between them.
"Rory?"
Cara's voice stopped her dead. The syllable landed like a stone dropped in still water. The whole bar seemed to lean toward the sound of it, or maybe that was just Rory's pulse hammering in her ears.
She turned. Cara had half-risen from her stool, one hand on the bar, the other frozen around her glass. Her eyes, still that impossible shade of green, wide and bright and searching, swept over Rory's face, the apron, the delivery bag, the small crescent scar on her left wrist that peeked out from her rolled-up sleeve.
"God." Cara set her drink down carefully . "It's really you."
"Cara." Rory forced her voice into something level. "What are you doing in Soho?"
"Conference. Publishing." Cara gestured vaguely, as if the entire industry could be captured in a hand wave . "But what are you, I mean, you're here? In London?"
"Been here a while."
"A while." Cara repeated the words like she was testing their weight . "Two years, Rory. You've been in London for two years and you didn't think to—"
"Can we not do this here?"
Cara looked around the bar, taking in the old maps on the walls, the dim lighting, the handful of regulars hunched over their drinks like gargoyles. Her gaze settled on Silas, who was watching them with studied disinterest, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the light as he set down his glass.
"Fine." Cara grabbed her coat. "Somewhere else then."
Rory looked at the takeaway bag. Thirty minutes, Yu-Fei's rules. She glanced at Silas.
He jerked his chin toward the door. "Deliver it. Then you're off the clock."
---
The delivery took seven minutes. The walk back took five. Rory found Cara waiting on the pavement outside The Raven's Nest, her coat collar turned up against the damp London evening, the green neon sign casting her in an eerie glow that made her look like a ghost from another life.
They walked without speaking for two blocks, past a shuttered newsagent and a kebab shop where a group of students argued about politics with the confidence of people who'd never paid a utility bill. Rory led them to a bench in a small square where a single street lamp buzzed and flickered . She sat down. Cara remained standing for a moment, arms crossed, then lowered herself onto the other end of the bench with the careful precision of someone choosing a seat on a crowded train.
"You look different," Cara said.
"People do."
"That's not what I mean." Cara turned to face her. "You look ... harder. Your eyes."
Rory said nothing. She studied a crack in the pavement, a jagged line that split into three like a river delta.
"Eva told me you left him," Cara said quietly. "Evan."
"Eva talks too much."
"Eva was worried. We all were."
"Was that before or after everyone stopped returning my calls?"
The words came out sharper than Rory intended. She pressed her lips together and watched a fox slink along the far wall of the square, its amber eyes catching the light before it vanished into the shadows.
Cara's jaw tightened. "That's not fair."
"No?"
"We tried, Rory. God, we tried. But every time we reached out, he'd answer your phone. Every time I came to the flat, he said you were sleeping, or busy, or out." Cara's voice cracked slightly , a hairline fracture in her composure. "What were we supposed to do?"
"Show up anyway." Rory looked at her then, really looked. "You showed up at three in the morning that last night. You showed up."
"Because Eva called me. Because she'd heard you crying through the wall and she was terrified." Cara rubbed her face with both hands, smudging what little makeup she wore. "I should have come sooner. I know that. I've known that every day since."
The fox reappeared on the opposite wall, bolder now, trotting along the base of a bin with a wrapper in its mouth. Rory watched it until it disappeared again.
"I didn't mean to disappear," Rory said. "I just couldn't be who I was anymore. And you all knew who I was."
"We knew who you are."
"Same thing." Rory flexed her left hand, the crescent scar pale in the streetlight. "When I got here, I didn't call anyone for six weeks. Not Eva, not you, not my mum. Six weeks of just existing, delivering food, sleeping above a bar, and not being anyone's anything." She paused. "It was the best six weeks of my life."
Cara flinched. A small, involuntary movement that she covered by reaching into her coat pocket for her phone, then thinking better of it.
"I got promoted," Cara said, as if the words could build a bridge across the silence . "Senior editor. Last September."
"I know. Eva showed me the post."
"So you've been watching."
"I've been existing. Eva's the one who watches."
They sat with that for a moment. The street lamp buzzed. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed and faded, another small emergency dissolving into London's background noise.
"Do you remember the night before our finals?" Cara asked. "Second year. We sat on the roof of the humanities building and you said you were going to be a barrister like your dad, and I said I was going to edit the next great Welsh novel, and we drank that terrible wine from the off-licence?"
"Pinot Grigio. Three pounds a bottle."
"You said it tasted like regret."
"It did."
"It tasted like possibility," Cara said. "We were wrong about a lot of things, but we weren't wrong about that night."
Rory leaned back against the bench. The metal was cold through her jacket. "What happened to the novel?"
"What?"
"The great Welsh novel. You were going to edit it."
Cara let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "I edit self-help books now. 'Five Steps to Your Authentic Self.' 'Mindful Parenting in a Digital Age.'" She said the titles with the precise diction of someone swallowing something bitter. "The great Welsh novel is still waiting."
"And the barrister thing?"
"Still waiting too."
They looked at each other. The distance between them on the bench felt both enormous and insufficient, the kind of gap that could be crossed in a single step or never at all.
"Come back to the bar," Rory said. "Let me buy you a drink that doesn't cost three pounds."
"Rory, I—"
"I'm not asking you to be who you were. I'm asking you to have a drink with who I am now." She stood and offered her hand, the crescent scar facing upward like a small, pale invitation. "C'mon. The owner's a spy. You'll like him."
Cara stared at the offered hand, then at Rory's face, searching for something she seemed to find in the set of her jaw, the steadiness of her bright blue eyes.
"A spy," Cara repeated.
"Retired."
"Of course he is."
She took Rory's hand. Her grip was warm, deliberate, and when she stood, she didn't let go immediately. They walked back toward the green glow of The Raven's Nest, shoulder to shoulder, neither speaking, the silence between them no longer empty but loaded, like the breath before a match is struck.
The door swung open. Silas looked up from behind the bar. His gaze moved from Rory to Cara's hand still in hers, then to Cara's face, cataloguing, assessing, filing away with the efficiency of a man who'd spent thirty years reading rooms and the people in them.
"Found yourself a ghost," he said.
"Found me, actually," Cara replied, and there was something in her voice, a steel Rory hadn't heard before, or perhaps had forgotten she'd always had.
Silas smiled, a rare expression that barely touched his eyes. "Ghosts are the worst kind of guests. They never know when to leave."
"And spies never know when to stop watching," Cara countered, sliding onto a bar stool with the ease of someone who'd spent years negotiating rooms full of powerful men.
Rory watched them size each other up, two people who'd sharpened themselves on different whetstones, and felt something shift beneath her ribs. Not quite warmth . Not quite fear. Something older and more complicated, the feeling of standing in a doorway between two rooms and knowing you could only ever live in one.
Silas placed two glasses on the bar, amber liquid catching the green light.
"On the house," he said. "For the reunion."
He limped away to serve another customer, his left leg stiff, the silver signet ring a flash of light in the dim room. Rory lifted her glass. Cara mirrored her.
"To being lost," Rory said.
"To being found," Cara replied.
They drank. The whisky burned a familiar path down Rory's throat, and across the bar, through the haze of conversation and clinking glass, she caught Silas watching them. He held up his phone. On the screen, a text glowed in the green light.
Three words. From a number Rory didn't recognise.
She read them twice, the warmth of the whisky turning to ice in her stomach .
*She knows about Prague.*