Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQXGTGW0DHRFF1EMMHBKY9

Rain had got into everything by half nine — Rory's collar, her socks, the seams of the thermal bag slung across her back. She dropped it by the door of the Nest and let the green neon wash over her while she wrung out her sleeve onto the mat. "Kitchen's shut," Silas said, without looking up from the glass he was polishing. "I've eaten. Cheung's sweet and sour, standing up, in an alley off Greek Street. Living the dream." "There's soup." "There's never soup." "There's soup tonight." He set the glass down and reached for the bottle of Talisker she hadn't asked for, which was the only kind of hospitality he practised. His signet ring ticked against the glass. "Sit before you drip on the maps." The bar held four people and all of them wanted to be left alone, which suited Rory. She took the stool at the crook of the counter, under the photograph of the trawler with no name painted on it, and put both hands round the whisky without drinking. The radiator behind her knees started up its clanking. The door went. Cold came in first, then a woman shaking out an umbrella with a wooden handle, folding it into a sleeve, doing up the strap. She had a camel coat that fell to mid-calf and shoes that had never once been in a puddle. She looked at the ceiling, then the maps, then the bar, and her mouth did something complicated. "God," she said. "It's actually a bar. Ceri said it was a bar and I assumed she meant a squat with a licence." Rory knew the voice before she turned. Nine years hadn't done a thing to the vowels. "Bethan." "Rory Carter." Bethan didn't come closer straight away. She stood there with her umbrella under her arm like a briefcase, taking her in — the wet hi-vis, the black hair plastered flat, the bag by the door with GOLDEN EMPRESS stitched across it in gold thread. "You've cut your hair." "You've cut about two stone." "Charming." She laughed, and the laugh was thinner than it used to be, the low dirty one that had got them thrown out of the Students' Union three times in second year sanded down to something you could bring to a meeting. She unbuttoned the coat and hung it on the hook and sat, one stool's gap between them, back straight. "Nobody warned me." "Warned you about what?" "That you'd be in it. I'm meeting a client at ten in a place with a name I can't pronounce and I had twenty minutes and a green sign." She turned her hand over. "That's all. It's not fate. Don't make it fate." Silas set down a coaster in front of her and waited. "Soda water. Lime, if the lime's fresh." "It isn't." "Then no lime." He went away down the bar and stayed there, which was his gift. Rory watched Bethan arrange herself: phone face-down, ring hand flat on the wood, thumb finding the band and turning it. The stone was enormous and she'd stopped noticing it, which meant she'd had it a while. "Who is he?" "Tom. Tax." Bethan said it like a full sentence and then, when Rory kept looking: "He's kind. He irons on Sundays. He thinks I'm funny, which is very generous of him because I stopped being funny in about 2019." "You were the funniest person in Wales." "I was the drunkest person in Wales. There's a Venn diagram." She took the soda water and drank half of it. "I don't, any more. Three years in March." "Right." Rory pushed her whisky an inch away, and hated herself for it, and Bethan clocked the whole manoeuvre. "Don't. Honestly. I sit in pubs for a living now. It's fine as long as nobody's precious about it." The radiator clanked. Somebody at the far end laughed at something on their phone. "You're a solicitor." "Barrister. Nearly. Pupillage at a set in Middle Temple, common law, mostly landlords who want people out by Christmas." She smiled at the counter. "Your dad wrote me a reference." Rory sat with that. The trawler in the photograph had a man on the deck with his back to the camera, and she'd looked at him a hundred nights and never once wondered who he was until now. "My dad wrote you a reference." "He's very proud of me. It's excruciating." Bethan turned the glass on the coaster, a quarter turn, another quarter. "He asks about you. I say I don't know, because I don't." "You could've asked." "I did ask. In 2017 I asked so many times your mother stopped picking up." She lifted her eyes then, and there it was, the old Bethan, straight through the middle of you like a bradawl. "Then I stopped. That's the bit you want, isn't it. I stopped." "I didn't say anything." "You've got that face on. The one from the ethics seminar." She drank. "I stopped because Evan told me at your birthday that you needed space from me. And I believed him, because it was easier than the other thing." The name landed and Rory's hand went, without permission, to the crescent on her left wrist, thumb over the ridge of it. She made herself stop. "What other thing?" "That you needed me and I'd have to do something about it." Bethan set the glass down very precisely. "That's the whole confession, by the way. That's all I've got. I've had nine years to make it more interesting and it hasn't got more interesting." Down the bar, Silas ran water into the sink and it covered them for a moment. "He broke my wrist in the November," Rory said. "Not this scar. This one's from a wall in Penarth when I was six. The wrist was the other one and it healed crooked, and it aches when it rains, so — always." "I know." "How do you know?" "Ceri's sister works at the Heath." Bethan's jaw moved. "I was in Bristol doing a mini-pupillage. I sent flowers to the wrong address." "You sent flowers." "I sent flowers." She laughed, and it had nothing in it. "Twenty-six pounds of chrysanthemums to a house in Roath where a man called Dai signed for them. So no. Don't be gentle with me. I've got a lovely coat and a set of chambers and I sent chrysanthemums." Rory looked at her — at the collarbones where there used to be a bit of softness, the roots done properly, the small vertical line between her brows that hadn't existed when they were nineteen and sharing chips on the steps of the National Museum at four in the morning, arguing about whether either of them would ever leave. "You've gone hard," she said. "I've gone employed." Bethan pulled her cuff down over the watch. "You're delivering noodles." "I'm delivering noodles." "With a first in law." "Two-two. And I never sat the finals, so it's a rumour." Bethan turned on the stool, at last, all the way, so their knees were nearly touching. "Did you know I keep your voicemail? The last one. September. You were on a bus and you said you'd ring me from London." "I didn't ring you." "No." "I couldn't have you asking me questions in that voice." "I know," Bethan said. "I've thought about the voice."