Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQRXZTSYHKX0EEG038XGW2

The rain had got into the delivery bag again. Rory could feel it through the nylon as she came up the steps from the street — the damp seeping cold against her hip while the foil trays inside kept their own stubborn heat, so that one side of her was freezing and the other side smelled like five-spice and scorched ginger. Two orders left. Then a hot shower in the flat upstairs and possibly, if she was very lucky, eight hours of sleep. The green neon over the door of The Raven's Nest buzzed and stuttered the way it had done since October. Silas kept saying he'd get a man in. Silas had been saying that for eight months. Inside, the bar was doing its Tuesday-night impression of a shipwreck: four people, all of them alone, all of them arranged as far from one another as the geometry allowed. The maps on the walls had gone brown and soft as old tea. Silas stood under the shelf of good whisky with a cloth over his shoulder, polishing a glass he had almost certainly already polished, his silver signet ring clicking softly against the base each time he turned it. "Yu-Fei's finest," Rory said, hoisting the bag onto the bar. "Two beef in oyster sauce, one crispy chilli tofu, and she says if you don't stop asking for extra sauce she'll start charging you for it." "She's been threatening that for a decade." He set down the glass. "You're soaked." "I'm aware." "There's a coffee in it for you, if you want to sit down for five minutes and pretend you're a customer." "I've got Frith Street to do." "Five minutes," Silas said, in the mild way he had that wasn't really mild at all, and turned to the machine. So she sat. She peeled off her jacket, which was suddenly twice its own weight, and hung it over the stool beside her, and it was in the middle of that small domestic act — one arm out, hair stuck to her cheek, the neon painting everything the green of a cheap aquarium — that a voice behind her said her name. "Aurora." Nobody called her that. Her mother, when there was going to be a discussion. A dentist's receptionist. And one other person, exactly one, who had used it as a joke for four years because she thought it sounded like a cruise ship. Rory turned around. She wouldn't have known her. That was the first thing, and it landed with a small ugly thud somewhere under her ribs. Cerys Morgan — Cerys who had shaved half her head in second year with a pair of kitchen scissors and cried about it for two days, Cerys who had smoked out of the window of the Cathays flat in a duvet like a Roman senator, saying *law is just storytelling for cowards, Rory* — was standing by the door in a navy coat with a collar you could cut bread on, holding a wheeled case, her hair a smooth expensive brown, her mouth painted the colour of a good conservative decision. "God," Cerys said. "It is you. I stood there for about a minute working out whether I could face it if it wasn't." "Cerys." "I saw the sign and I thought, that's a horrible sign, I'll have a drink." She laughed, and the laugh was still hers, too loud for the room, and something in Rory's chest unclenched about half an inch. "This is absurd. This is genuinely absurd. What are you doing in Soho?" "I live here." Rory nodded at the ceiling. "Upstairs. Above this." "Above a *bar*." "It's quieter than you'd think." Cerys came the rest of the way, parked the case, and got up on the stool with the wariness of a woman in a skirt that hadn't been designed for stools. Up close there were changes that had nothing to do with money. The vowels, mostly. The Cardiff had been sanded off them, filed down and lacquered, so that when she said *absurd* it came out with a hard little London edge, a word that had been to chambers and back. Silas set the coffee down in front of Rory and looked, briefly, at Cerys. "Something for your friend?" "Whatever the red is," Cerys said. "Large, if there's a large." "There's a large." He poured it and withdrew down the bar and became furniture, which was a thing Rory had watched him do a hundred times and had never once seen anyone notice. "You look well," Cerys said. "I look like I've been dragged out of the Taff." "You look well and you've been dragged out of the Taff. Both can be true." She drank. "Right. Go on then. What is it. Are you at one of the big firms? Are you doing something insufferable in-house?" Rory turned her cup around on the bar. There it was. The question, arriving right on time, wearing its friendly face. "I deliver food," she said. Cerys's expression did the thing that expressions do — the half-second of scramble, the little internal reshuffle, and then the smooth recovery, which was worse than the scramble. "Right," she said. "Okay." "For a woman called Yu-Fei. She's about four foot eleven and she terrifies everybody." "And that's — what, while you're doing something else?" "It's while I'm doing this," Rory said. The neon buzzed. Somebody's phone went off in the corner and was silenced. "I made pupillage," Cerys said, into the gap. "Third Circuit set. I'm second-six now. I did a fraud trial in January that went eleven weeks." She said it the way you'd hand over identification at a border. "I'm married. Two years in September. He's a solicitor, which is embarrassing, but there we are." "Cerys." "Mm?" "You wanted to make documentaries." "I wanted to be twenty," Cerys said, and drank again, and for a moment the polish came off her entirely and there she was, the girl in the duvet, sitting inside this glossy woman like a hand inside a glove. "You wanted to be a barrister." "No, I didn't. My father wanted me to be a barrister." "You never said." "I said it constantly," Rory said. "You just weren't listening. Nobody was. It was a very well-attended silence." Cerys set her glass down. Her thumb moved on the stem, back and forth, and the wedding ring caught the green light. "I rang you," she said. "After. About eleven times, I think. Then the number was dead." "I changed it." "I know you changed it." "Eva said I should. She was right." "I'm sure she was." A pause, thin as paper. "I didn't know it was as bad as that. With Evan. I want to say — I didn't know." There were about nine things Rory could have said, and she went through them all in the time it took her to lift the coffee and put it down again untasted. *You knew.* Not the whole of it, no. But there had been a Thursday in February when Rory had phoned her at half past one in the morning from a bus shelter on Whitchurch Road, and Cerys had answered, and Rory had heard music behind her and a man's voice, and Cerys had said, *you two, honestly, you're as bad as each other,* fond and sleepy and half-drunk, and Rory had said *yeah, no, you're right,* and hung up, and gone back. She didn't say any of it. That was the astonishing thing — she felt the words assemble and then she felt herself decline them, the way you'd decline a second drink, and she understood that this was what people meant when they said someone had changed. "I didn't come to your mam's funeral," she said instead. Cerys's jaw moved. "No." "I found out four months after. Someone put it on Facebook, and I was standing in the queue in a Tesco Metro on Berwick Street, and I just—" She stopped. "I should have come." "You couldn't have known." "I could have been findable," Rory said. They sat with it. Down the bar Silas turned a page of something without appearing to read it, and the rain went on hitting the window in handfuls, and the neon buzzed and steadied and buzzed. "Eleven weeks," Rory said at last. "The fraud trial. Did you win?" "God, no. Catastrophe." And Cerys laughed, properly, the old laugh, the one that used to get them thrown out of the library, and Rory found she was laughing too, and it hurt in a place she couldn't have located on a chart. "Absolute catastrophe. He was so obviously guilty. He kept *winking* at the jury." "Winking." "Winking, Rory." Rory wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Her jacket dripped quietly onto the floorboards. Two orders left, and Frith Street was three minutes away, and in a moment she would stand up and put the wet coat back on and go out into it, and one of them would say *we should do this properly*, and mean it, and neither of them would. But not yet. She reached over and took Cerys's wrist, briefly, the way she used to, and Cerys's hand turned to meet hers as if no time had passed at all — as if there weren't seven years sitting between them on the bar like a third drink nobody had ordered.