Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQX4QPVQVC2ZG9HB9B95JZ

The rain had got into everything by the time Rory pushed through the door of the Nest — into the collar of her jacket, the cuffs, the laces of her boots, the paper bag of receipts she should have handed in three hours ago. The green neon over the entrance turned the puddles on the step the colour of pond water. Inside it was warm and low and brown, the way it always was, the old maps on the walls curling gently at their corners like something breathing in its sleep. "You look drowned," Silas said, without looking up from the glass he was drying. "I feel drowned." She peeled the hi-vis off and hung it on the hook by the cellar door that had, by long custom, become hers. "Cheung had me out to Bloomsbury and back twice. Twice. Same address. The man ordered a second dinner while eating the first." "An optimist." "A monster." She climbed onto the third stool from the end, which was also hers, and put her elbows on the bar, and only then noticed that the woman two stools down had gone very still. It happened the way those things do — not recognition first but the body's odd chemical alarm, the sense of being looked at from an angle no stranger should have. Rory turned. The woman was in a charcoal suit that fitted her the way suits fit people who have them fitted. Hair pinned up. A slim gold watch. A glass of red she had barely touched, and beside it a phone face-down, and beside that a leather folio with a firm's crest stamped in the corner. Her face was thinner than Rory remembered. Everything about her was thinner and straighter and better-lit. "Aurora," the woman said. Nobody called her that. Nobody had called her that since Cardiff, since her mother's voice up the stairs on school mornings, since — "Nia?" "Hello." Rory laughed, one syllable, disbelieving. "Nia Pritchard." "Still." Nia's mouth did something that was almost the old smile and then decided against it. "Still Pritchard. It comes up." "You're — God." Rory looked at her, the whole length of her, and felt her own damp jeans, the smell of soy and hot oil that lived in her hair now and would not be argued with. "You're in London." "Three days. A hearing at the Rolls Building." Nia turned the stem of her glass a quarter-turn. "The clerk recommended this place. He said it was quiet." "It is quiet." Silas set a glass of water in front of Rory without being asked, and the silver of his signet ring caught the light, and then he took himself down the far end of the bar to polish things that did not need polishing. Fifty-eight years of knowing exactly when to be furniture. "You work here?" "I live upstairs. I work for a restaurant. Deliveries." Rory heard herself say it and heard, underneath, how it must land. "It's temporary." "For how long?" "Four years." Nia's eyes went to the hi-vis on the hook. There was no judgement in it, which was worse. When they were fifteen, Nia had judged everything and everyone out loud, savagely, brilliantly, mostly to make Rory laugh in lessons. She'd been the one who couldn't sit still, who got them both barred from the Spar on Wellfield Road, who cried at a school hymn and then punched the wall of the sports hall so no one would think she'd cried. Now she sat with her ankles crossed and her hands quiet and there was a stillness in her Rory did not know how to read. "You've changed," Rory said. "That's usually meant as an insult." "It isn't." "It usually is." Nia lifted the wine at last and drank a mouthful, precisely, like it was medicine she had made peace with. "You haven't. Changed. You've got the same — " she gestured at Rory's face, vaguely, and let the hand fall. "You always looked like you were about to solve something." "That was the problem. I never solved anything, I just looked like it." Rory pushed her wet hair back off her forehead. "You're a solicitor." "Barrister's junior. Commercial. Insolvency, mostly. It's very dull and very well paid, and I'm good at it, which surprises absolutely everyone including me." A beat. "Your father would have hated it. He always said commercial law was carpentry for cowards." "He said that to you?" "He said that to me across your kitchen table when I was seventeen, with his hand round a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD, and then he asked me if I'd thought about the Bar." Nia's voice didn't change but something in her jaw did. "I hadn't. Nobody had ever asked me if I'd thought about anything." Rory looked at the bar top. Somebody had carved a small crooked star into the varnish years ago and Silas had never sanded it out. "So you did it," she said. "I did it." Nia turned her head. "You didn't." "No." "You had the pupillage. Chambers in Bristol. Your mam told my mam." She said it flatly, without accusation, and that was the trapdoor. Rory felt the drop of it. Because there it was — *my mam* — and the last time Rory had heard that phrase in that voice was over the phone in a stairwell in a flat in Newport, with Evan in the next room and the television too loud, and Nia crying so hard Rory could not make out the hospital's name. The silence went on a fraction too long. "Nia—" "It was a long time ago." "I should have come." "You should have come." Nia set the glass down. Her hand was perfectly steady. "There were forty-two people in that chapel and I knew thirty-nine of them by name and I stood at the front on my own because my brother was in Perth and couldn't get a flight. And I kept looking at the door. Which is stupid. It's a stupid thing to do at your mother's funeral, and I did it for the entire service." "I know." "You don't, though. That's the thing." She said it almost gently. "You don't know, because you weren't there, and I've had eleven years to build a version of you standing in the back of that chapel, and she's very convincing, and she isn't real, and I don't know what to do with her." Rory turned her water glass in a slow circle. Down the bar, Silas moved a bottle two inches to the left with great care. "I was in a bad place," she said. "That's not — I'm not offering it as a defence." "Good, because I've heard better." "I couldn't leave the flat some weeks. I couldn't answer the phone if it rang twice." Rory's thumb found, without her permission, the small crescent scar on her left wrist, and rubbed it. "I told myself I'd write. Then I told myself it was too late to write, and then that was true, and being right about it felt almost as good as having done it." Nia's eyes went to the wrist. To the scar. Rory saw her see it. "The garage door," Nia said quietly. "You were nine. You screamed the whole way to the Heath and then you told the nurse you'd been in a knife fight." "You told the nurse I'd been in a knife fight." "I was corroborating." And there it came — the smile, the real one, crooked and quick and entirely fifteen — and then it folded itself away like a letter being put back in a drawer, and the charcoal suit sat up straight again. "I'm in chambers at eight." "Nia." "It's not a punishment. It's eight o'clock." She stood, and slid the folio under her arm, and took a card from a slim case and set it on the bar between them, squaring it to the edge with one fingernail. "That's my direct line. Not the switchboard." Rory looked at it. Embossed. Somebody's whole life in nine words. "You won't ring," Nia said. "I might." "You might." She pulled her coat on, and for a moment, in the green light coming through the window, she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hearing. "That's worse, actually. I'd forgotten that about you. You always leave the door open and never come through it." She went out into the rain. The door swung, and settled, and the maps on the walls stirred, and Silas came back down the bar with the bottle he'd been pretending to need. "Whisky," Rory said. "Wasn't going to ask." She sat with the glass in front of her for a long time without drinking it, and the card stayed where Nia had left it, squared to the edge, and Rory did not pick it up, and she did not let anyone clear it away either.