AI The rain had polished Soho to a black shine. It slicked the shoulders of Rory’s jacket, crept beneath her collar, and turned the green neon above the Raven’s Nest into a trembling stain across the pavement.
She shouldered through the door with two sacks of takeaway balanced against her hip.
“Your supper,” she called, “assuming you’ve not died of stubbornness.”
At the far end of the bar, Silas Blackwood raised his head from the day’s accounts. The low lamps caught the grey in his auburn hair and the silver signet ring on his right hand. “I’d have thought stubbornness made one exceptionally difficult to kill.”
“It makes one difficult to feed.”
“You’re late.”
“It’s raining.”
“This is London.”
“Exactly. You’ve had decades to arrange better weather.”
A few of the regulars glanced over, smiling into their drinks. Rory carried the sacks behind the bar, where the air smelled of lemon peel, old wood, and the sharp medicinal whisky Silas insisted was wasted in cocktails. Her wet hair clung in black points to her jaw.
Silas closed the ledger. “Yu-Fei send the dumplings?”
“Two portions. One of which she said was expressly not for you.”
“Then why are there two?”
“She knows I live upstairs.”
“She knows you’ll give me half.”
“She knows you’ll steal half.”
Silas came around the bar with his slight, measured limp, refusing as always to favour the left leg until the last possible moment. He opened one sack and peered inside with the gravity of a man examining evidence from a crime scene.
Rory was peeling off her jacket when the woman in the third booth said, “Laila?”
The name went through her cleanly.
For one absurd second, Rory looked towards the door, as if the person being called might have entered behind her. Nobody in London called her Laila. Nobody except telemarketers called her Aurora. She was Rory here, or Carter when Silas wanted to sound severe, or Malphora when Yu-Fei’s youngest had decided she required a villain’s name.
Laila belonged to Cardiff. Laila belonged to cheap eyeliner, wet bus stops, a fake name scribbled on club wristbands because she and Nia had decided their real ones were too ordinary for the lives they meant to have.
Rory turned.
The woman stood slowly from the booth.
At first Rory saw only differences. Nia Morgan’s hair, once a wild brown mass she had hacked herself over a bathroom sink, was cropped close to her skull and silver at the temples. Not grey threaded through brown, but deliberate silver, bright as wire . She wore a dark wool coat buttoned to the throat. Her face had narrowed. The softness was gone from her cheeks, and there was a pale seam through her left eyebrow .
Then Nia tilted her head.
That was unchanged . That small, birdlike angle, as if the world had said something questionable and she was giving it one last chance to explain itself.
“Christ,” Nia said.
Rory folded her jacket over her arm because her hands needed a task. “Hello, Nia.”
“You are Laila.”
“Not for some years.”
“No.” Nia’s smile appeared and failed. “No, I suppose not.”
Silas looked from one to the other. His expression did not alter, but Rory knew the attention beneath it: the swift inventory, the filing of details. He took the takeaway sacks.
“I’ll rescue these from neglect,” he said. “Your usual table is free, Rory.”
It was not a question. He moved away, setting two bowls beneath the bar, though Rory had no doubt he would remain within earshot without appearing to.
Nia glanced after him. “Your usual table?”
“I live upstairs.”
“Above a pub?”
“Bar,” Rory said. “Apparently there’s a distinction.”
“There is if the owner’s listening.”
“He always is.”
They sat in the booth beneath a framed map of pre-war Vienna. Rory took the side facing the room by instinct. She noticed herself doing it and disliked the little flare of satisfaction that followed. Nia noticed too. Her gaze flicked to Rory’s chosen seat, then to the entrance, then back.
“You look…” Nia began.
Rory waited.
“Well,” Nia finished.
“You look different.”
“Yes.”
The word settled between them, too deliberate to be casual. Up close, the seam through Nia’s eyebrow was not pale but pearl-white, smooth in the low light . Her hands rested around a glass of red wine. No rings. Her nails were short and unpainted. There had once been chipped blue varnish on them every day of their first year, a shade called Electric Funeral that Nia bought because she loved the name and hated the colour.
“How long are you in London?” Rory asked.
“I live here.”
Rory blinked. “Since when?”
“Eighteen months.”
“In London.”
“Yes.”
“And we’ve managed not to collide until now.”
“It’s a large city.”
“Sometimes.”
Nia rubbed her thumb down the stem of her glass. “I saw you from the street. Through the window. Or thought I did. Then I told myself it couldn’t be. You used to hate London.”
“I used to hate olives and black coffee.”
“You used to say London looked like somebody had forgotten to wash it.”
“That remains true.”
Nia laughed, and for a moment the years made a mistake and let them through. Rory saw her at nineteen on the floor of their student kitchen, laughing so hard over a burnt saucepan that she could not breathe. Saw the cheap yellow cabinets, the rain pearled on the window, their textbooks unopened beneath takeaway menus. Nia had wanted to design theatre sets. Rory had wanted—what? Not law. Never law, though she had trudged towards it because Brendan Carter spoke of sensible futures as if they were moral obligations.
The laugh faded. Nia lifted her wine, but did not drink.
“What are you doing now?” she asked.
“Deliveries, mostly. For a restaurant in Chinatown.”
“You left university to deliver food?”
There it was: not contempt, exactly. Surprise sharpened by an old expectation. Rory felt her shoulders tighten.
“I left university for several reasons. The food came later.”
“Sorry. That sounded awful.”
“It sounded honest.”
“It wasn’t meant to.”
“Most awful things aren’t.”
Nia flinched.
Rory looked down at the table. A crescent of condensation had formed beside the wineglass. She traced it with one finger, then stopped when her sleeve shifted and exposed the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. Nia stared at it.
“You still have that.”
“I’ve not worked out how to return it.”
“You told everyone you got it fighting a dog.”
“I was eight.”
“You fell through the greenhouse door.”
“I was a liar at eight.”
“You were a liar at twenty-two.”
Rory met her eyes.
The bar seemed to draw back around them. Glass touched wood. Ice shifted in a tumbler. Somewhere near the door, a man cleared his throat and continued a story in a lower voice.
Nia looked away first. “I’m sorry.”
“For which bit?”
“For saying it like that.”
“But not for saying it.”
“No.”
Silas placed a glass of water beside Rory without interruption or comment. His signet ring clicked softly against the glass. He gave Nia one brief glance, hazel eyes unreadable , and returned to the bar.
Nia watched him go. “Does he always do that?”
“Bring water?”
“Appear when you need rescuing.”
Rory drank. “I don’t need rescuing.”
“No,” Nia said. “You never did.”
The old anger arrived so quietly Rory almost mistook it for grief.
She set the glass down. “That’s a convenient thing to believe.”
Nia’s face closed. Not hardened—closed, as shutters closed against weather. “I didn’t know.”
“You knew enough.”
“I knew you’d stopped coming out. I knew you changed your number twice. I knew Evan was jealous and you kept saying it was complicated.”
“He checked my phone in front of you.”
“You laughed.”
“I was embarrassed.”
“I thought you were in love.”
“I was frightened.”
Nia’s mouth tightened. The white seam through her eyebrow caught the green pulse from the sign outside.
“I asked you,” she said. “At your birthday. In the toilets at that dreadful place on St Mary Street. I asked if you wanted to come home with me.”
“And I said no.”
“You said I was jealous because he loved you.”
Rory remembered. Not merely the words, but Nia’s face after them: shocked, then carefully blank . Evan had been waiting outside the toilets. He had smiled when Rory came out, his hand warm and proprietary at the back of her neck. On the walk home, he told her Nia wanted her miserable. He said lonely women poisoned whatever happiness they could not own.
At the time, it had sounded plausible. Evan had been skilled at making cages resemble conclusions Rory had reached herself.
“I know what I said,” Rory murmured.
“Do you?” Nia leaned back. “Because I’ve remembered it for three years.”
“Only three?”
“I tried after that.”
“You sent one message.”
“I sent dozens.”
“Not to the numbers I had.”
“You kept changing them.”
“He kept changing them.”
Nia went still.
The sentence lay exposed between them. Rory had not intended to offer it. She had spent years learning that truth , once given, did not always become safer. Sometimes it only changed owners.
“He did that?” Nia asked.
Rory looked past her, towards the old photographs on the wall. Men in heavy coats beside cars with rounded bonnets. Women with waved hair and cigarettes. Unknown faces preserved from unknown losses. “Among other things.”
“Rory.”
The name sounded strange in Nia’s voice. Careful, borrowed.
“I heard you left Cardiff,” Nia said. “Eva told Carys, and Carys told me. By then you’d been gone six months.”
“You could have asked Eva for my number.”
“She said you didn’t want people to have it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes.” Nia swallowed. “So I didn’t ask again.”
Rory almost said, You might have tried harder. The words rose hot and childish, carrying all the cruel simplicity of the abandoned: if you loved me, you would have found the exact key to the lock I denied existed.
Instead she said, “Fair enough.”
“No. Not fair enough.” Nia pushed her wine away. “I was relieved.”
Rory studied her.
Nia’s hands had begun to tremble, barely. She tucked them beneath the table.
“When I heard you’d gone,” Nia continued, “I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to decide whether to try again. You’d made the decision for me. I told myself you had Eva and your parents, and you’d always been the clever one. You’d sort it out.”
“The clever one.”
“You were. You are.”
“Clever women are famously immune to bad men.”
“I know that now.”
There was something in the way she said it. Rory’s attention sharpened.
The cropped hair. The scar. The buttoned coat despite the warmth of the room. The absence of jewellery, though Nia had once worn rings on every finger and silver chains enough to set off an airport detector.
“What happened to your eyebrow ?” Rory asked.
Nia’s gaze moved towards the rain-blurred window.
“Bicycle accident.”
Rory waited.
Nia gave a short, humourless breath. “You always did that.”
“What?”
“Went quiet when you knew I was lying.”
“I thought I was a liar at twenty-two.”
“You were. You just hated competition.”
The corner of Rory’s mouth twitched. It vanished when Nia unbuttoned her coat.
Beneath it she wore a high-necked black jumper. Nothing remarkable . But as she reached for the wine, the fabric pulled tight across her shoulder, and Rory saw the care in the movement. Not pain, perhaps. Memory of pain. The body’s private caution.
“Her name was Jules,” Nia said. “We met in Bristol. I moved there after graduation.”
Rory said nothing.
“It wasn’t the same,” Nia continued quickly . “I don’t mean—there’s no comparison. She never stopped me seeing people. She didn’t take my phone. She just…” Nia looked down. “She was ill, and I made allowances. Then the allowances became the whole relationship.”
“Did she do that?” Rory nodded towards the scar.
“She threw a mug. It broke against the wall.”
Rory’s stomach contracted.
“I left,” Nia said. “Eventually. I’m very good at telling the story now. There are tidy phrases for everything. Escalation. Coercive patterns. Trauma bond. A whole clean vocabulary laid over a filthy time.” She touched the scar with one finger. “This is the part people understand. They see it and stop asking why I stayed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I used to think I’d have known. If it happened to me, I mean. I thought I was the sort of person who’d know.”
“So did I.”
Nia looked at her then, and the years between them did not disappear. They changed shape. They became something built jointly: a wall perhaps, but one with both their handprints pressed into the mortar.
“I should have tried harder,” Nia said.
Rory breathed in. The Raven’s Nest smelled of whisky and fried ginger now, and the damp wool of coats drying by the door. Outside, the neon buzzed green against the rain.
“I should have told you,” she said.
“You tried.”
“Not very well.”
“Maybe neither of us knew the language yet.”
Rory thought of all the languages they had invented instead. Laila and Nia, grand names for girls with no money. The coded looks across lecture halls. The shorthand of old jokes. Later, Evan’s language, in which concern meant surveillance and love meant debt. Then London, where Rory had learned the usefulness of plain speech from people who lied professionally.
“Why Laila?” she asked.
Nia smiled faintly. “You really don’t remember?”
“I remember the fake names. I don’t remember why that one.”
“You said Aurora sounded like a princess who died before the story started. Laila sounded like someone who stole the horse and got away.”
Rory looked down at her scar, the little white moon at her wrist.
“God,” she said. “I was unbearable.”
“You were magnificent.”
“That’s not how I remember it.”
“No.” Nia’s smile thinned. “We rarely are.”
At the bar, Silas lifted one of the takeaway bowls and pointedly examined the contents. Rory knew the performance. Dumplings cooled quickly ; opportunities, in his view, faster.
She glanced at Nia’s nearly full glass. “Have you eaten?”
“Not since lunch.”
“We’ve got dumplings.”
“Your landlord stole them.”
“He’s under the impression he did.”
Nia looked towards Silas, who was already setting out a third bowl.
“Does he know everything?” she asked.
“He thinks so.”
“I heard that,” Silas called.
“You were meant to.”
Nia laughed again. This time it did not transport Rory backwards. It belonged to the present: lower than it had been, roughened at the edges, but alive.
They moved to the bar. Silas served the dumplings without introduction, inquiry, or visible satisfaction. Nia took the stool beside Rory, leaving half a foot of space between their elbows.
It was not forgiveness. Rory knew better than to mistake food and laughter for that. Forgiveness, if it came, would be less like a door opening than a room rebuilt after fire. There would be smoke in the plaster. Some things would always smell burned when it rained.
Nia bit into a dumpling and shut her eyes.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s indecent.”
“Yu-Fei’s,” Rory said. “Golden Empress.”
“Do you like working there?”
The question held no judgement now. Or less of it.
Rory considered. “I like moving through the city. I like knowing every back route between Chinatown and Bloomsbury. I like that nobody asks me to become a barrister.”
“Your father must be thrilled.”
“He’s practising acceptance from a safe distance.”
“And your mother?”
“Sends me job listings and pretends they’re accidental.”
Nia nodded. “My mother still asks when I’m going back to theatre.”
“Are you?”
“I design accessibility adaptations for museums now.”
“That sounds important.”
“It sounds dull at parties.”
“We used to attend parties where a man named Owain played a saucepan with a wooden spoon.”
“He had rhythm.”
“He had ketamine.”
Nia choked on her dumpling. Rory laughed before she could stop herself and slid over the water. Their hands touched around the glass.
Both of them paused.
Nia’s fingers were colder than Rory remembered. Or perhaps Rory only remembered them in summer: linked through hers as they ran across Bute Park, blue nails flashing; gripping her wrist outside a club; knocking against hers under library tables. Memory kept its own climate.
Nia released the glass.
“I’m on Wardour Street,” she said. “Not tonight. I mean, I live there. If you ever…”
She did not finish.
Rory could have spared them both. She could have offered her number, suggested coffee, made a promise with the lightness people used when they did not mean to keep one. Instead she sat with the unfinished sentence.
“I don’t know what we are now,” she said.
Nia nodded. Hurt passed across her face, but she did not hide from it. “Neither do I.”
“But I’m usually here after nine.”
“Most nights?”
“Too many.”
Silas made a quiet sound of objection.
“Most nights,” Rory amended.
Nia looked down at the bowl between them. “All right.”
It was a small answer. It asked for nothing. Rory found, to her surprise, that she trusted it more than an apology.
Outside, the rain weakened to a silver mist. People passed beneath the green sign, their faces briefly illuminated and gone. Inside, Nia ate another dumpling. Silas polished a glass that was already clean. Rory sat between the woman she had been and the woman she had not quite finished becoming, feeling the old name move through her like a distant train—audible, then fading, leaving the table faintly trembling after it had passed .