AI The green neon sign flickered once as the door opened, a brief stutter in the steady hum of the bar. Rory looked up from the glass she was drying , the rag still in her hand, and saw a woman standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the wet gleam of the Soho street beyond.
It was the way she stood that slowed Rory's hand. The slight tilt of the head, the weight shifted to one hip as though the body remembered a posture it had long abandoned. The woman pushed back the hood of her coat and took a step inside, and the dim light caught her face.
Rory's breath stopped.
The woman looked around the bar, her gaze sliding over the old maps pinned to the walls, the black-and-white photographs in their cheap frames, the few scattered patrons hunched over their drinks. Then her eyes found Rory behind the bar, and they both froze in that shared moment of recognition, the strange suspension of time that happens when the past walks through a door you thought you'd locked.
"Rory?"
The voice was the same. That was the first crack in the wall Rory had built. The voice still carried the soft lilt of Cardiff, the vowels rounded and warm, but there was something else now, something frayed at the edges.
"Catrin." Rory set the glass down carefully , as though it might shatter. "Jesus. Catrin Morgan."
Catrin laughed, but it came out wrong, a short exhale that wasn't quite amusement . "It's Catrin Davies now, actually. Has been for three years." She walked toward the bar, and Rory watched the way she moved, the careful economy of it, nothing like the girl who used to dance on tables at the Students' Union, who once climbed a statue of Aneurin Bevan in Queen Street at two in the morning, singing badly and gloriously.
She settled onto a stool, and the leather creaked under her weight . Up close, the changes were stark . Catrin's hair, once a cascade of messy copper curls she never bothered to tame, was cut short and neat, a tidy bob the colour of dull pennies. Her face had thinned, the cheekbones sharper, and there were lines around her eyes that hadn't been there four years ago. She wore a grey coat, sensible and expensive, and when she unbuttoned it, Rory saw a cream blouse and a string of small pearls.
"I'm sorry," Catrin said, and for a moment Rory thought she meant everything, all of it, the years of silence and the things left unsaid. But Catrin just gestured at the glass in Rory's hand. "I interrupted your work. Can I get a drink?"
"Right. Yeah. Of course." Rory reached for a clean glass. "What are you having?"
"Gin and tonic. Heavy on the gin."
The old Catrin had drunk cheap cider from plastic bottles in the park. Rory poured the gin, added tonic, pushed the glass across the bar. Their fingers almost touched, and they both pulled back.
"So," Rory said, because someone had to say something. "What are you doing in London?"
"Conference." Catrin took a long drink, closed her eyes as the gin hit. "Accountancy continuing professional development. Thrilling stuff. Tomorrow I get to sit in a windowless room in Canary Wharf and learn about changes to the tax code."
"Accountancy." Rory heard the disbelief in her own voice. "You were going to be a photographer. You had that exhibition in Chapter Arts Centre. The one about the abandoned coal mines."
Catrin's smile was thin and practiced. "That was a long time ago."
"It was four years."
"Four years is a long time when you've got a mortgage and a husband who expects dinner on the table by seven." She said it without bitterness, which somehow made it worse, as though she had simply accepted the death of her own ambition the way one accepts the weather.
Rory picked up the cloth again, needing something to do with her hands. The bar was quiet for a Wednesday night. Silas had stepped out an hour ago, leaving her to lock up. The rain had started again, a soft percussion against the windows, and the neon sign cast a green pall across the room that made everyone look slightly underwater.
"I looked for you," Catrin said suddenly . "After you left. I went to your flat and it was empty. I called your phone for weeks. It just rang and rang."
"I changed my number."
"I know. I figured that out eventually." Catrin turned her glass in small circles, watching the liquid swirl. "Evan came looking for you too. He showed up at my place, drunk, wanting to know if I'd heard from you. Said you'd stolen some money from him."
Rory's jaw tightened. "I took what was mine. What I'd earned from working two jobs while he sat on the couch and told me I was lucky he put up with me."
"I know that now." Catrin looked up, and her eyes were the same deep brown they'd always been, but there was a weariness in them that hadn't been there before . "I didn't know it then. I was still making excuses for him. The way everyone did."
"Why are you here, Catrin?"
The question hung between them, heavy and sharp. Catrin took another drink, and when she set the glass down, her hand trembled slightly .
"I'm getting divorced." She said it flatly, as though reading a number off a spreadsheet. "Graham. My husband. He's a good man, really . Kind. Reliable. Works in finance. My mother loves him."
"But you don't."
"I love him the way you love a comfortable chair. He's not exciting, but he's there , and he's safe, and he doesn't hit you or scream at you or take your money." She met Rory's eyes . "I thought that was enough. I told myself that was enough. That love wasn't supposed to be the thing you see in films, the grand gestures and the sweeping passion. That real love was quiet and steady and boring."
"And now?"
"Now I'm thirty thousand pounds in debt from the wedding, living in a house I hate in a suburb I never wanted to live in, and I spend my days calculating other people's taxes while my dreams wither and die in a filing cabinet somewhere." She laughed, and this time there was something real in it, something raw. "I don't even take photographs anymore. I sold my camera to pay for the honeymoon."
Rory stood very still. The rag was cold in her hand. She thought about the day she'd left Cardiff, the train station platform, the rain that fell in sheets as she climbed aboard with a single bag and three hundred pounds in cash. She thought about Eva meeting her at Paddington, the flat above Silas's bar, the delivery job that paid barely enough to keep her in noodles and rent. She thought about the nights she'd woken up gasping, convinced Evan had found her, his hands around her throat.
"I'm sorry," Rory said, and meant it. "I should have stayed in touch. I should have told you where I was going. I just—I needed to disappear completely . If I'd called you, if I'd let myself have one thread back to that life, I wouldn't have been able to leave."
"I'm not angry at you for leaving." Catrin's voice cracked, just slightly . "I'm angry at myself for staying."
The bar was silent except for the rain and the faint hum of the neon sign. A clock ticked somewhere behind the shelves of bottles. Rory could feel the weight of the years between them, the vast landscape of things they hadn't said, the paths they'd taken that had led them to this moment, two women in a dim bar in Soho, strangers wearing the skins of girls they used to be.
"I always thought," Catrin began, and stopped. She shook her head. "Never mind."
"Tell me."
"It's stupid."
"Catrin."
Catrin looked at her, and for a moment she was twenty-one again, full of cheap wine and reckless courage, the girl who climbed statues and photographed ruins and believed the world was hers to shape. "I always thought I'd end up with you. Not in a romantic way. Or maybe in a romantic way. I don't know. I just thought we'd be together, somehow. That we'd end up in the same city, getting drunk on weeknights, laughing about the people we used to be. That you'd be at my wedding, and I'd be at yours. That we'd grow old and forget to call each other but it wouldn't matter because we'd always find our way back."
Rory's throat tightened. She looked down at her hands, at the small crescent scar on her wrist, a reminder of a childhood accident that felt like it happened to someone else . "I thought so too."
"I saw you once," Catrin said. "About two years ago. On the news. There was a fire in a restaurant in Chinatown, and you were being interviewed because you'd helped get people out. You looked different. Stronger. Like you'd built yourself into someone new." She smiled, a real smile this time, small and sad. "I was proud of you. I wanted to call you and tell you, but I didn't have your number, and I thought maybe you didn't want to hear from me anyway."
"I wanted to hear from you." Rory leaned forward on the bar. "Every day. Every single day, I wanted to hear from you."
The tears came silently, sliding down Catrin's cheeks without so much as a sob. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, a gesture so familiar it made Rory's chest ache.
"I should go," Catrin said, but she didn't move.
"Don't." Rory reached across the bar and took her hand, the way she should have done four years ago, the way she should have done a hundred times before. "Stay. Have another drink. Tell me about your life, the parts you're willing to share. And tomorrow, if you want, I can show you the London I've found. It's not much, but it's mine ."
Catrin looked at their hands, at the place where their fingers interlaced. The green light from the sign caught the edge of her face, and she looked younger suddenly , or maybe just more like herself.
"I'd like that," she said.
Outside, the rain kept falling. The neon sign flickered once, twice, then held steady. And two women who had been girls together sat in the quiet of the bar and began the slow work of building something new from the wreckage of what they'd lost.