Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G8ST4JT3YMBVHQC96WRZR

The green neon bled through the window in long stripes across the bar top, and Rory was polishing glasses she had already polished once that evening when the door opened and Delyth Pryce walked back into her life. For a second Rory did not recognise her. The woman who came in wore a charcoal coat cut close to the waist, a leather bag slung over one shoulder, and her hair — which Rory remembered as a riot of bleached blonde, re-dyed every other month in some fresh defiance — was a smooth, expensive brown. She was laughing at something one of her companions had said, two men in the soft, tired suits of people who had taken the train down from a conference. It was the laugh that did it. A brief, sharp note at the top, like someone striking a tuning fork. Rory's hand tightened on the glass. Delyth saw her the same instant. The laugh broke off. She touched one of the men on the forearm and said something Rory couldn't hear, and crossed to the bar alone, her coat whispering. "Aurora Carter," she said. "Jesus Christ." "Delyth." "It is you. I thought I'd lost my mind for a second." She set her bag on the stool beside her and lowered herself carefully onto the next one, and it was then Rory noticed the small, neat curve under the coat, the way she angled her body to accommodate it. "God, how long has it been? Four years?" "Five," Rory said. She had not meant to know the number so exactly. "Nearly six." "Nearly six." Delyth shook her head. She was looking at Rory the way one looks at a photograph turned up in an unexpected drawer, equal parts pleasure and private arithmetic. "You cut your hair." "You grew yours." "I grew up." She laughed, and this time the laugh was softer, chastened, as if she had heard how the word landed. "I mean — you know what I mean. What are you doing here? You're in London?" "I live upstairs." "Upstairs." Delyth glanced at the ceiling as if she might see through it. "In Soho. Above a bar." "Above this bar. It's a long story." "I've got a drink's worth of time. Maybe two." She waved vaguely at the men at the far table, who had resigned themselves to a booth and a bowl of olives. "Gin and tonic. Just tonic, I mean. Lime if you've got it." Rory cut the lime without looking at it. She was conscious, suddenly and absurdly, of the scar on her left wrist, the small white crescent she had worn so long she had forgotten to hide it, and of Delyth's eyes tracking across the bar as if reading a room she'd once known and finding the furniture rearranged. "Tell me about it, then," Delyth said. "The long story." "There isn't much to tell." "There's always much to tell. You don't move from Cardiff to a bedsit above a Soho bar because nothing happened." "It isn't a bedsit. It's a flat." "Rory." The old name, said in the old voice, landed somewhere under her ribs. She set the glass down in front of Delyth and braced her hands against the bar. "I left Evan," she said. "After finals. Eva helped me. I didn't finish the bar exam." Delyth did not say _I'm sorry_, which Rory was grateful for, and she did not say _I told you so_, which Rory was more grateful for, because she had. Once, in a kitchen in Cathays at three in the morning, with the rain slapping the window and a bottle of cheap red between them, Delyth had told her, very carefully, that she didn't like the way Evan said Rory's name. Rory had laughed. She remembered laughing. She remembered thinking _you wouldn't understand, you've never stayed anywhere long enough_. "I'm glad you got out," Delyth said. "I'm glad you — " Rory gestured, uncertainly, at the coat, at the bag, at the whole polished shape of her. "You look well." "I look like my mother." Delyth made a face. "I know. I'm a solicitor now. Property. Can you imagine? Me, conveyancing." She shook her head. "I married Tom. You didn't know that." "I didn't know that." "Three years last April. We're expecting in June." "Congratulations." "Thank you." She looked at Rory over the rim of her glass, and for a moment the old Delyth surfaced, the one who had painted murals on the walls of the student union at two in the morning and been sick in a taxi on the way home from Swansea. "You'd have been invited to the wedding. If I'd known where you were." "I didn't tell anyone where I was." "No," Delyth said. "I gathered." They were quiet. A man at the other end of the bar raised two fingers for another pint and Rory poured it without looking at him, the tap's hiss filling the space between them. Silas was somewhere in the back — she could hear the muffled creak of the floorboard in the office, the one he favoured when he was pretending not to listen. She wondered if he was listening. She wondered if he could tell, from the timbre of her voice, that something in her had gone quiet and careful. "You were going to be the barrister," Delyth said at last. "That was the joke. You were going to wear the wig and I was going to — " she laughed — "I don't know what I was going to do. Live in a van. Paint. Something." "You hated law." "I hated what it made you into." Delyth said this without heat, without even particular attention, as if she had thought it so many times it had worn smooth. "I kept waiting for you to notice. You were so bloody clever, Rory, I couldn't understand why you couldn't see it. You went around like someone carrying a heavy box and asking everyone if the box looked all right." Rory swallowed. The polished glass was in her hand again. She did not remember picking it up. "I didn't see it," she said. "Not then." "No. Well." Delyth turned the tumbler on its coaster, a quarter turn, another quarter. "Neither did I, really. I only thought I did. It's easy, isn't it, to see what someone else should do." The men in the booth were calling her name — _Del, Del, we're going to lose the table_ — and she raised her glass to them without looking, in a gesture Rory remembered, and did not remember, all at once. She drained the tonic. She set the glass down very precisely, as if its placement mattered. "I'm in town until Thursday," she said. "The Marriott on Grosvenor Square. You could come. For breakfast. If you wanted." "I'll think about it." "That means no." "It means I'll think about it." Delyth smiled. It was not the laugh; it was smaller and sadder and more like the girl Rory had known. She stood, gathered her bag, and for a moment her hand hovered over Rory's on the bar, not quite landing. "It's good to see you, Rory." "You too, Del." She watched her go. The door swung shut. The green neon laid its stripes back across the bar top, and Rory stood holding a clean glass and listening to the floorboard in the back office, which had, at some point in the last few minutes, gone entirely still.