Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GE73QE7BW7NR6P5800EZB

The green neon bled through the window and painted the nearest table the colour of pond water. Rory had claimed the stool at the far end of the bar, where the brass rail was worn smooth by decades of forearms, and she was nursing a whisky she hadn't asked Silas to pour but that he'd pushed toward her without comment when she came down from the flat. He knew the look. She had been carrying it around since Thursday. She was turning the glass on its coaster when the door chimed, and a voice she hadn't heard in six years said, "Christ. You're joking." Rory didn't turn at first. She watched her own face assemble itself in the mirror behind the bottles, and then she watched the other face appear beside it, and only then did she look. "Niamh." "Aurora bloody Carter." Niamh hadn't changed, which was almost worse than if she had. Same rust-coloured hair yanked back too tight, same chipped front tooth that she'd got falling off a kerb outside the student union in second year. But there was a softness at the jaw now, a tiredness that sat under the skin the way damp sits in old walls. She was holding a laptop bag against her hip like a child she'd forgotten she was carrying. "Sit down before I decide I'm imagining you," Rory said. Niamh slid onto the stool. She set the bag on the floor with the care of someone who had stopped being able to afford replacements. Silas, at the other end of the bar, pretended to polish a glass and watched from the corner of his eye, which was the closest thing he ever offered to a blessing. "What are you drinking?" "Whatever's cheapest." "House red," Rory called, and Silas moved without looking up. "You live here, then." Niamh said it like a verdict. "Eva told me London. She didn't say Soho. She didn't say — " Her hand flicked at the room, at the green light, at the photographs of men in overcoats who had probably all been dead for years. "This." "I live above it. Silas owns the place. He's all right." "All right." Niamh laughed, a short sound, more air than voice. "You cut your hair." "Years ago." "Suits you." "You always hated it long." "I never said that." "You did. Freshers' week. You said I looked like a girl in a shampoo advert who'd had some bad news." Niamh put her forehead against her fingertips, and for a moment Rory thought she might be laughing, and then she thought she might not be. The wine arrived. Niamh drank half of it in one go. "I'm in town for a conference," she said. "Publishing thing. I'm at Faber now, sort of, on contract. Assistant to an assistant. It's all — you know. It's fine." She looked at Rory properly for the first time. "You never answered any of my emails." "I know." "Not one, Rory." "I know." "I wrote you a letter. An actual letter, on paper, like an idiot, after your mum rang mine and said you'd left. I sent it to the Cardiff house and it came back. I sent one to Eva's old address in Finsbury Park. It came back too. I thought you were dead, for about a fortnight. I'd convinced myself." The whisky tasted of nothing now. Rory rolled the glass between her palms. "I wasn't dead." "No. You were just gone." "It wasn't about you." "I know it wasn't about me." Niamh's voice wasn't raised; it had gone small instead, which was how she'd always argued, even at twenty. "That's what made it unbearable. If it had been about me I could have fixed it. Or broken something in return. But you just — vanished. And then Eva rings me last Christmas, after how many years, and she says, oh, Rory's fine, she's in London, she's working in a Chinese restaurant, she's happy. And I thought, happy. Right. Lovely. And I didn't ring you." "Why not?" "Because by then I was furious. And because I thought if you'd wanted me you'd have found me. And because I'd got used to the shape of you not being there." She drank the rest of the wine. "I'm at the Premier Inn on Leicester Square. I walked in here because the sign was green and I felt sorry for myself. That's the whole story." Silas put another glass down beside her, unasked, and retreated. "I left him," Rory said. Niamh went very still. "Evan." "I know his name." "I left him. That's why I went. I couldn't — I couldn't write it down. I couldn't ring anyone. I couldn't be the girl in the story. Eva came and got me. I spent six months not opening the curtains. By the time I could have written back, I didn't know how to be the person who hadn't written. Does that make sense?" "No." "No. It doesn't to me either, most days." Niamh was looking at the small scar on Rory's wrist, the crescent that had been there since they were nine years old and Rory had put her hand through a greenhouse pane reaching for a cat. She had always touched it absently when she was thinking. Niamh reached out now, and then stopped, her fingers hovering above the bar, and withdrew them as if she'd remembered she no longer had the right. "You should have told me," she said. "I couldn't." "You should have let me be the one who knew." "Niamh." "I would have come. I would have driven up. I had that awful green Corsa, do you remember, I'd have driven up in the Corsa and sat outside his flat and — " "I know you would have. That's part of why I couldn't." They sat with that. The bar filled a little, a couple by the window, a man in a wet coat ordering a pint and a packet of crisps. The jukebox was playing something low and American that neither of them was listening to. "You look older," Niamh said. "I am older." "I don't mean the years." She turned her glass. "I mean you look like someone who's had to think about things. You didn't used to." "I thought about things." "You thought about essays. You thought about whether Dr. Henshaw fancied you. You didn't think about — " She waved her hand again. "This weather. This kind of weather." Rory smiled, almost. "No. I didn't." "I've missed you," Niamh said, and she said it like a woman admitting to a debt, not a feeling. Rory put her hand on the bar, palm up, the scar showing. She didn't know if it was an invitation or a surrender. Niamh looked at it for a long time before she covered it with her own.