AI The rain had polished Soho to a black shine by closing time. It slid down the windows of the Raven’s Nest and fractured the green neon outside into trembling veins. From behind the bar, Rory watched the last customers gather coats and courage.
A man in a camel overcoat had fallen asleep beneath a map of Cold War Berlin. Two women near the door argued amiably over whose turn it was to pay for the taxi. Someone had left a single leather glove beside an empty whisky glass.
Silas moved among the tables with a tray balanced on one hand, his limp more pronounced at the end of a long night. He collected glasses without hurry. There was no music now, only the scrape of chairs, rain ticking against the windows, and the soft complaint of old pipes in the walls.
“You’re not working,” he said.
Rory looked down at the tea towel she had twisted into a rope between her hands. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“You’re hiding.”
“From whom?”
Silas glanced toward the sleeping man. His silver signet ring flashed as he lifted the abandoned whisky glass. “At present, only yourself. But you’re making a thorough job of it.”
Rory threw the towel at him. He caught it against his chest and smiled without showing his teeth.
She had come downstairs because the flat above the bar felt too small. That was all. Four walls, a mattress, two mugs, the throb of rain on the skylight. She had completed her deliveries for the Golden Empress at nine, eaten half a carton of noodles standing over the sink, and spent an hour not calling her mother. None of this constituted hiding. It constituted a Thursday.
The door opened before Silas could lock it.
Cold air swept in, carrying rain and the smell of wet pavement. A woman stood beneath the green neon with one hand still on the door, blinking into the dimness. Her hair was cropped close at the sides and silver-white on top. Rain beaded on the shoulders of a scarlet coat. A black case, long and narrow, hung from her back.
“Sorry,” she said. “Are you still serving?”
Her voice struck Rory before recognition did.
For a moment the years collapsed in the wrong order: salt wind over Cardiff Bay, school blazers damp at the cuffs, cheap cider behind the leisure centre, a girl singing badly into a hairbrush while Rory lay on a bedroom floor and laughed until she could not breathe.
“Nia?”
The woman turned.
Rory saw the recognition arrive piece by piece. The slight widening of the eyes. The mouth parting. One hand rising, then stopping halfway to her face.
“Oh,” Nia said.
It was not Rory’s name. Somehow that made it worse.
Silas looked from one to the other. “We’re still serving.”
“We’re closed,” Rory said.
“We’re flexible.”
The last customers drifted out beneath umbrellas. Silas woke the sleeping man with the practised tenderness of someone defusing a bomb, found his coat, and steered him into a cab. When he returned, he set two glasses on the bar.
“Whatever this is,” Rory said, “I don’t need whisky for it.”
“Then it will remain decorative.”
He poured anyway.
Nia approached slowly , as if Rory were a dog that had once bitten her. Up close, the changes multiplied. A fine white scar crossed her upper lip. Silver hoops climbed the curve of one ear. Her face had sharpened, losing the softness Rory remembered, and there were tired lines around her dark eyes. The black case on her back was a violin case, its corners worn pale.
“You cut your hair,” Rory said.
Nia gave a small laugh. “Seven years ago.”
“Right.”
“You didn’t.”
Rory touched the ends of her straight black hair where they brushed her shoulders. “Not really .”
It was the sort of exchange strangers made in lifts. Both of them heard it.
Silas put the whisky between them and withdrew to the far end of the bar. He made a business of counting the till, though Rory knew he could count it blindfolded in a burning room.
Nia eased the violin case from her shoulder and leaned it against a stool. “I’m playing two streets over. Or I was. Session ran late.”
“You play violin now?”
“I always played violin.”
“You hated violin.”
“I hated Mrs Llewellyn.”
Rory remembered a stout woman with nicotine-yellow fingers rapping Nia’s knuckles with a pencil. “Everyone hated Mrs Llewellyn.”
“Exactly.”
Nia slipped off her wet coat. Beneath it she wore black trousers and a black shirt buttoned to the throat. There was ink on her left forearm: a flock of small birds lifting toward her elbow. Rory tried not to stare and failed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’ve noticed something and decided not to ask about it.”
“I don’t have a face.”
Nia looked at her then, properly. “You have several. That one survived.”
The old rhythm flickered between them, frail as a match. Rory felt an answering warmth before she could stop it. Then Nia looked down, and the flame went out.
Rory reached for the whisky. It burned more than she expected.
“What are you doing in London?” Nia asked.
“Living.”
“Yes, I gathered that.”
“Working.”
“At a bar?”
“Not exactly. I live upstairs. I deliver for a restaurant in Chinatown.”
Nia waited. Rory could see the missing pieces arranging themselves in her mind: Cardiff University, Pre-Law, Brendan Carter telling anyone who would listen that his daughter had inherited his arguments, Jennifer buying Rory a second-hand briefcase before the end of first year. All those clean, sensible lines leading to a room above a Soho bar and the smell of sweet-and-sour sauce sunk permanently into her jacket.
“What happened to law?” Nia asked.
“I escaped.”
“From law?”
Rory’s fingers tightened around the glass. The crescent scar on her left wrist went white.
Nia noticed. Of course she noticed. She had been there when Rory acquired the scar, aged nine, climbing through the broken greenhouse window because the door was locked and because Nia had said she was afraid . Rory had gone first. Rory always went first.
“From a few things,” Rory said.
Nia lowered herself onto the stool opposite. “Your mam said you moved.”
“You spoke to Mam?”
“I see her sometimes. Cardiff is not a continent.”
“It can be.”
“Only if you want it to be.”
There it was: the first blade laid neatly on the table.
Rory looked toward Silas. He was polishing a glass now, his head bent. The old photographs along the wall watched in their frozen silence —soldiers, diplomats, women in dark glasses stepping off aeroplanes. People who had known how to disappear properly.
“How is she?” Rory asked.
“Your mother?”
“No, Mrs Llewellyn.”
Nia’s mouth tightened. “Your mam is fine. She pretends not to worry about you with such commitment it’s almost convincing.”
“I call.”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes.”
Nia nodded, once, as though confirming an old suspicion . The movement was worse than accusation.
Rory set down her glass. “You don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn up after nine years and take attendance.”
“I didn’t turn up for you.”
“I know.”
The answer landed between them.
Rain hissed beneath tyres outside. Somewhere in the building, a door closed. Silas placed the polished glass upside down and selected another.
Nia’s fingers found the whisky, though she did not drink. They were long and callused, the nails cut short. Rory remembered those hands painted with blue glitter polish, stealing chips from her plate, threading daisy chains, gripping hers under a table while Brendan Carter explained why two girls could not possibly hitchhike to Swansea.
“I wrote to you,” Nia said.
Rory stared at the shelves behind the bar. Bottles glowed amber and green in the low light. “I know.”
“Six times.”
“I know.”
“You never answered.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“You could’ve started with sorry.”
Rory laughed, a hard little sound. “There it is.”
“What?”
“The invoice.”
Nia recoiled, almost imperceptibly. “You think that’s what this is?”
“I think you’ve had nine years to rehearse.”
“And you’ve had nine years to avoid it.”
Rory stood. The stool legs scraped sharply against the floor. “I’m not doing this.”
“No. You never do.”
Silas looked up.
It was only a glance, but Rory felt it like a hand at the centre of her back. Not restraint. A reminder that the door remained where it had always been.
She could leave. She could climb the narrow stairs to her flat and turn the lock. She had built a life out of exits. Cardiff. University. Evan’s house with her clothes stuffed into bin bags while Eva waited in a hired car with the engine running. Every departure had felt, briefly, like victory.
Nia watched her with the exhausted stillness of someone who had learned not to chase.
That was the change, Rory realised. Not the hair, the scar, the birds inked on her arm. The old Nia would have come around the bar. She would have blocked the stairs, cried first, shouted second, demanded every answer Rory did not have. This woman simply sat with both hands around an untouched drink and allowed Rory to go.
The absence of pursuit held her more effectively than any locked door.
Rory sat down again.
Nia exhaled through her nose.
“I heard about your brother,” Rory said.
Nia’s eyes closed.
There it was, at last: the thing that had waited beneath every failed sentence.
“I was going to come,” Rory said.
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
“To the funeral?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
Rory saw the church as she had imagined it then: grey stone slick with rain, Nia’s family in the front pew, Tomos reduced to a box no one could look at. She had dressed in black. She had stood in the hall of the flat she shared with Evan, holding her coat. He had asked why she needed to go. Then he had asked who would be there. Then why Nia mattered so much. By the end, he had taken her keys and Rory had apologised for upsetting him.
At twenty-two she had still believed shame was evidence of guilt.
“I couldn’t,” she said.
Nia’s expression hardened. “You always say that as if it means something different from wouldn’t.”
“He wouldn’t let me.”
Silence widened.
Rory had not meant to say it. The words seemed to belong to someone else, some pale and stupid girl she had left in a locked kitchen in Cardiff.
Nia glanced at Rory’s wrist again, but the crescent scar was old and innocent. The other injuries had faded. That had been one of the crueller things about them.
“Evan?” Nia asked.
Rory nodded.
Nia’s face changed—not softened, exactly, but opened around the old hurt . “Rory.”
“Don’t.”
“Did he—”
“I said don’t.”
Silas’s polishing cloth moved in slow circles. He did not look over. His presence filled the room nevertheless, solid and unobtrusive as the walls.
Nia swallowed. “All right.”
“I left.”
“All right.”
“I’m not asking you to make it excuse what I did.”
“No.”
“I should have come.”
“Yes.”
The simple agreement hurt less than pity would have.
Rory looked at Nia’s violin case. A paper tag clung near the handle, marked with airport codes and frayed at the edges. “Where have you been?”
“Vienna, mostly. Berlin for a year. Touring when there’s work. Teaching when there isn’t.”
“You’re good, then.”
“I work.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
A trace of the old Nia appeared in one lifted eyebrow . “Yes. I’m good.”
Rory smiled despite herself. “Arrogant cow.”
“You used to like that about me.”
“I liked that you could lie with conviction.”
“I learned to play.”
“I can see that.”
“No.” Nia’s thumb moved over the rim of her glass. “I learned to play after Tomos died. Properly, I mean. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stay in the house. So I practised in the shed until Dad threatened to cut the strings. Then some teacher in Bristol heard me, and one thing became another.”
Rory pictured seventeen-year-old Nia in a freezing garden shed, bow sawing through the dark while grief crowded the windows. She had not been there. At the time Rory had been memorising case law she despised and learning to make herself smaller for a man who called jealousy love.
“I thought you’d be a singer,” Rory said.
“So did I.”
“You wanted stadiums.”
“I wanted applause. It turned out I could get that sitting down.”
The laugh came quietly this time, shared and unwilling. It left behind a tender silence .
Nia drank at last and winced. “God. That’s awful.”
“It’s expensive,” Silas called from the other end.
“That doesn’t improve it.”
“It improves my opinion of it.”
Nia glanced at him, then back at Rory. “Your landlord?”
“Something like that.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Almost certainly.”
Silas inclined his head and disappeared through the door beside the shelves. Rory knew the real hidden room lay elsewhere, behind a bookcase no ordinary customer ever noticed, but the gesture was clear enough. He had granted them privacy without making it feel like abandonment.
Nia traced a water ring on the bar. “I nearly called you last year.”
“Why?”
“Dad got ill.”
Rory’s stomach tightened. “Is he—”
“He’s alive. Better, mostly. But I was in a hospital corridor at three in the morning, and I remembered when we were thirteen and he had that heart scare. You sat with me under the vending machine because I said the chairs were unlucky.”
“They were orange.”
“They were hideous.”
“You fell asleep on my foot.”
“I woke up and you were still there.”
Rory looked down at her hands. “I was better at staying then.”
“We were children.”
“Maybe that made it easier.”
Nia considered this. Outside, the rain had thinned to a silver mist. The neon raven above the entrance buzzed faintly, turning the wet pavement green.
“I didn’t call,” Nia said. “Last year.”
“I gathered.”
“I wanted you to know what it felt like.”
Rory met her eyes.
Nia did not flinch from the ugliness of the admission. That, too, was new. The girl Rory remembered would have dressed it up as forgetfulness or bad timing. This woman set it down bare.
“Did it help?” Rory asked.
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For which part?”
“All of it.”
Nia’s mouth trembled , once. She looked toward the window. “That’s inconvenient.”
“What is?”
“I’ve spent a long time imagining you didn’t care.”
“I know.”
“It made things tidier.”
“I’ve never been tidy.”
“No. Your bedroom was a public health concern.”
“Mam still blames you.”
“She’s right.”
Rory rubbed her thumb over the small crescent on her wrist. Nia reached across the bar, not quite touching it . Her fingers stopped a breath away.
“You went through first,” she said.
“You were scared.”
“I’m still scared.”
“Of broken glass?”
“Of finding out we’re strangers.”
Rory looked at the hand suspended between them. She could have closed the distance. Once, it would have been automatic. Now the inch of dark wood between their fingers contained nine years, a funeral, six unanswered letters, a locked kitchen, Vienna winters, and all the separate mornings in which neither had known what the other was doing .
“We are,” Rory said.
Nia’s hand began to withdraw.
Rory caught it.
The calluses pressed against her palm. Nia’s grip tightened with startled force, then settled. Nothing repaired itself. Time did not reverse. Tomos remained dead. The letters remained unanswered. They were not the girls beneath the vending machine, and pretending otherwise would only be another kind of abandonment.
“But we don’t have to stay that way,” Rory said.
Nia looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes shone, though no tears fell.
“No,” she said. “I suppose we don’t.”
Behind the bar, somewhere beyond the closed door, Silas dropped a bottle with a crash loud enough to be deliberate.
Rory laughed. Nia did too, the sound breaking open between them, older than memory and changed by it.
Outside, a taxi passed without stopping. Neither of them moved to hail it.