AI The rain had thinned to a mist that hung in the green light of the sign outside, so that anyone coming up the steps arrived looking faintly drowned and faintly radioactive. Rory liked that about the Nest. It made everyone equal at the door.
It was a Tuesday, the deadest hour of a dead night, and she had claimed the far end of the bar with a half-finished lime and soda and a paperback she wasn't reading . Upstairs, her flat had a radiator that clanked like a man trapped in a pipe. Down here there was Silas, moving along the shelves with a cloth, and the ceiling fan going round out of habit, and forty years of somebody else's photographs on the walls — men in flat caps outside factories, a woman laughing on a bridge in a city Rory couldn't name.
The door went. She didn't look up. People came in wrong all night: tourists who wanted cocktails with names, a man last week who'd asked if this was a jazz place.
"Oh my God," said a voice, "Aurora Carter."
Nobody called her Aurora. Her mother, when she was in trouble. A dentist's receptionist. And this voice — warm and flat and Cardiff, the vowels sitting exactly where they'd always sat — belonged to a girl who used to steal her father's cigarettes and smoke them behind the leisure centre in the rain.
Rory turned.
For a moment she couldn't assemble it. The woman in the doorway had Nia Prosser's face, but Nia's face had been organised into something new: hair cut into a sleek dark bob, no fringe, no dye, none of the burgundy she used to bleed onto pillowcases. A camel coat, belted. Small gold earrings. The kind of leather bag that costs a month's rent and doesn't announce it. She was carrying a folded umbrella like a barrister carries a brief.
"Nia."
"I nearly walked past. I thought, no, that's not — and then I thought, that's exactly the sort of place." Nia laughed, and the laugh was the same, thank God, too loud for the room. "Eight years."
"Seven."
"Seven." Nia came to the bar and put the umbrella down and did not sit, not yet, the way people don't sit when they're deciding whether they'll be staying. "You've got the same coat."
Rory looked down at it. Black, waxed, the cuffs gone shiny. "It's a good coat."
"It was a good coat in 2016."
Silas had drifted up the bar the way weather drifts, without seeming to move. "What can I get you?"
"Soda water. Lots of ice." Nia caught Rory's eyebrow going up and lifted a hand, half apology. "I've got a thing at eight tomorrow. Croydon Crown."
"Croydon Crown," Rory repeated.
"I know."
"You said you'd rather die than do criminal."
"I said a lot of things." Nia sat down at last, unbelting the coat, and the movement was careful, a woman aware of fabric. "You said you'd rather die than do law at all, and look, one of us kept her word."
Silas set down the glass, ice cracking, and the silver signet ring on his right hand caught the light. He looked at Rory for a fraction of a second longer than the drink required, then took himself off to the other end of the bar with his cloth and became furniture. She'd never worked out how he did that. It was probably a course, somewhere in the sixties, in a building that no longer existed.
"So you're what," Nia said. "You're in London."
"I'm in London."
"Doing what?"
Rory turned her glass on the mat. "Deliveries. Chinese place on Gerrard Street. Yu-Fei's."
Nia's face did something small and quick, and then didn't do it. That was new too — the not-doing. The old Nia had had a face like a shop window; you could see everything in it and the prices.
"That's good," Nia said. "That's — is it good?"
"It's fine. She's the best boss I've ever had. She shouts at everyone, which is fair. She gives me the ones over the river because she knows I like the bridges."
"Aurora Carter, cycling over Waterloo Bridge with a bag of dumplings."
"Southwark, mostly."
"Southwark, mostly." Nia drank her soda water. "Your mam rang me."
There it was. The room got very slightly smaller, as though the walls had leaned in to listen with their maps and their dead strangers.
"When."
"March. Then again in June." Nia set the glass down. "She had my mother's number off the Christmas card list. She didn't ask anything, really . She just wanted to know if I'd heard from you. She was very — Rory, she was so polite about it. She kept saying she didn't want to be a nuisance."
"She's not a nuisance."
"I know she's not. I'm telling you what she said." Nia looked at her, and the old directness came up through the new face like a stone through water. "I didn't have anything to tell her. That's the bit I keep thinking about. Seven years of my life and I couldn't give the woman one sentence."
Rory watched the ice shift in her own glass. Outside, a taxi went past and the green neon swam on the wet window.
"I write to her," she said. "Not often."
"Postcards?"
"Letters. Actual ones."
"Where do you say you are?"
"I don't."
Nia let that sit . She'd learned that too, Rory thought — how to let a thing sit until it started to speak for itself. They taught you that in the profession her father had wanted for her. She wondered if Nia had been taught it by the same men.
"You know he moved to Bristol," Nia said.
"I don't want to know where he is."
"Fine." Nia's hands were flat on the bar now, and her wedding ring was a plain band, thin, unshowy. "Fine."
"You could have told me he'd moved," Rory said, "or you could have told me nothing, and both of those are things you decided. You always were the one who decided."
"That's not fair."
"It's Tuesday. I'm not being fair on Tuesdays anymore."
Nia laughed, one breath of it, and then her mouth went unsteady. She pressed a knuckle briefly to her top lip, a gesture Rory remembered from a school corridor, from a bus stop after somebody's father's funeral.
"I introduced you," Nia said.
"Nia."
"At Sioned's twenty-first. I said, that's Evan, he's doing a Masters, he's very clever, you'll like him." She was looking at the row of bottles, not at Rory. "I have thought about that sentence more than I have thought about my own wedding vows. I want you to know that. I'm not asking you to do anything with it, I just — it's been sitting in my chest for seven years and I've walked into a bar in Soho and there you are, in that coat, and I'm not going to carry it back out with me."
Rory found she had put her hand over her left wrist without meaning to, thumb resting on the little crescent scar, the one she'd got at nine years old going over the handlebars in Roath Park while Nia screamed behind her. Nia's eyes went to it and stayed. There was no need to say anything about that. They'd both been there.
"You couldn't have known," Rory said, and heard how thin it sounded, how much like a line you'd give a stranger.
"I knew in the second year." Nia's voice didn't rise. That was the terrible part. "I knew when you stopped coming out. I knew when you said you'd walked into the door frame and I said, oh, you idiot, and we talked about something else. I was twenty-two and it was easier to talk about something else." She turned her glass . "That's the whole thing. There isn't any more to it than that. I've imagined all sorts of conversations where there's more to it."
Down the bar, Silas set a bottle down very quietly, so as to make no sound at all, which was its own kind of sound.
"I didn't tell anyone I was going," Rory said. "Not you, not my mother. Eva got me a room and I got on a coach at ten past six in the morning with a rucksack and I didn't ring anyone for eleven months. So." She shrugged, and it cost her. "There's things sitting in my chest too."
Nia nodded slowly . "You look well," she said. "That's not a polite thing. You look like you're in your body. You used to stand like you were apologising for the space."
"I like the bridges," Rory said. "I like being able to be anywhere by nine o'clock."
"Are you happy?"
"That's a barrister's question."
"It's a friend's question."
"Then ask me a different one."
Nia looked at her for a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, smiled — not the new smile, the old one, crooked and unlovely and true. She reached into the expensive bag and took out a card, and on the back of it, with a fountain pen, wrote a mobile number and, under it, a second number and the word MAM.
"Your mother's," she said, sliding it across . "The landline's changed. They moved to the flat by the church."
Rory didn't pick it up. She looked at the ink drying on the card, at the confident loops of a hand that had once written I HATE ARISTOTLE on the inside of a library desk.
"I'm not going to ring you," she said.
"I know."
"I might ring her."
"I know." Nia stood, belted her coat, took up her umbrella. At the door she stopped. "Southwark Bridge," she said. "That's the one that looks like nothing. That's why you like it."
Then the green light swallowed her, and the door closed, and the fan went round.
Rory sat with her thumb on the crescent scar. After a while Silas came down the bar and topped up her soda without being asked and said, mildly, without looking at her, "The card'll still be there in the morning."
"I know," she said.
She left it lying face down until closing.