Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR250PQD89C9A97F2SS4GD

Rain had got into the seams of the delivery bag, and the bag had got into Rory's jacket, so that when she pushed through the door of the Nest she brought the smell of wet nylon and five-spice with her. Silas didn't look up from the glass he was drying. "Cheung's has you out in that?" "Cheung's has me out in worse." She dumped the bag by the end of the bar, where it slumped like something shot. "Two orders to Meard Street. Same building, different floors, neither of them would come down." "And the tip?" "A packet of crisps and a sincere apology." She climbed onto the stool nearest the till, the one with the split in the leather she'd been picking at since March. "Whatever's open." He poured her a glass of the red he kept for himself and set it down without ceremony, then went back to the far end where a man in a courier's fleece was working through a crossword he had no intention of finishing. The green neon threw its usual sick light across the front windows. On the wall above the optics, a photograph of Trieste in 1974 had come slightly loose from its pin and hung at an angle nobody but Rory ever noticed. The door went again. Cold came in first, then a black wool coat with the collar up, then a woman shaking water off an umbrella that actually worked. Rory knew the walk before the face. Heel-toe, quick, like the pavement owed her money. "Nia." The umbrella stopped mid-shake. For a second neither of them did anything, and the bar went on around them, the crossword man's pen scratching, Silas sliding a bottle into the rack. "Aurora Carter." Nia's mouth did something complicated. "In a basement in Soho. Of course." "It's a ground floor." "It smells like a basement." She came over. She was thinner than Rory remembered, or the coat was better cut, and her hair had gone from the mad Cardiff frizz to something smooth and expensive that ended in a blunt line at her collarbone. She put the umbrella in the stand by the door like a person who had used an umbrella stand before. "God. Six years?" "Seven in February." "You'd know." Nia sat. She looked at the split leather, then sat anyway. "You always kept the calendar." Silas materialised. "What can I get you?" "Gin and tonic. Whatever the gin is, I don't care." She turned back to Rory while he moved off. "You look—" "Don't." "I was going to say you look like you've been rained on." "I have been rained on." "Well then." A laugh came out of her, half a note of the old one. "Are you working? Is this—" Her eyes went to the thermal bag, the branding on the side, the taped-over corner. "Are you doing food?" "I deliver for a restaurant three days a week." Rory drank. "Golden Empress. Best sweet and sour in the postcode and I'll take that to arbitration." "Rory." "There it is." "There's what?" "The voice. My mother does it on the phone. Two syllables and an entire cross-examination." Rory turned the glass by its base. "What are you doing here? You've never been north of the M4 in your life without a reason." "I've been here four years." That landed somewhere under the ribs. Rory kept her face still, the way she'd learned to. "Four." "Chambers took me on after pupillage. Crown Office Row, then I moved. Regulatory, mostly. It's dull and it pays." Nia accepted her glass and held it without drinking. "I did look for you. At the start. Your Facebook died. Eva blocked me." "Eva blocks everybody. It's a hobby." "She sent me a message first. Do you know that?" "No." "It said, *don't.*" Nia set the drink down. "One word, lowercase, no punctuation. I read it about forty times on the Tube." The crossword man got up, left coins on the wood, and went out into the rain. Silas collected the glass and the coins and drifted towards the back, and the bookshelf door, and left them the length of the bar. "She was looking after me," Rory said. "I know she was." "You could have written anyway." "You could have picked up in Bristol." "That's not—" Rory stopped. Started again, lower. "That's not the same thing and you know it isn't." Nia's thumb went along the edge of the bar, back and forth, a habit from the old flat on Colum Road where the kitchen table had a lip of chipped Formica. "You had a mock trial the week after," she said. "Bell was going to put you up for the Inns scholarship. He told me. He came and asked me where you were, and I stood in the corridor outside the moot room and told him you were unwell, and he looked at me like I was six years old." "I was unwell." "You had a burn on your forearm in the shape of a hair straightener." "Jesus, Nia." "You wore that grey cardigan for eleven days in June." Rory looked at the optics. The Trieste photograph, hanging crooked. The lettering on the mirror, reversed. "Twelve," she said. "It was twelve." Nia's hand went flat on the wood and stayed there. "I said," she began, and then went round it, "I said he was under pressure. About his upgrade. I said he was under pressure and you two just needed—" "A holiday. You said a holiday. Tenby." "Tenby." Nia laughed, and it came out wrong, cracked in the middle. "I said Tenby." "You did." "I was twenty-one and reading about *intention* and I couldn't recognise it standing in my own kitchen." She lifted the gin, drank properly this time, put it down. "I've had clients since. Regulatory, like I said, so nothing like — but I've sat across from people and watched them explain themselves and I keep thinking, I know this. I've had this conversation with the toaster on. And I said Tenby." "You were my friend, not my brief." "I was supposed to be better than that." "So was I." Rory turned on the stool to face her properly. "I stayed nineteen months after that conversation. Nineteen. That's not a thing you did to me, Nia. That's mine." "I'm not trying to take it off you." "You're carrying it round like a receipt." "What am I supposed to do with it?" Nia's voice went up, and she pulled it back down, glancing at the empty room out of a reflex she'd probably picked up in some panelled corridor. "Every February I think about phoning your mother. Every February. I got as far as the last digit twice." "She'd have talked to you. She likes you. She thinks you're the version of me that came out properly." "Don't do that." "I'm not being poisonous, I'm quoting." "She said that?" "She said, *Nia's got herself sorted.*" Rory shrugged. "Which is true. You've got a coat that repels water. That's more sorted than anyone in my building." Nia looked at her for a long moment. Under the good haircut and the good wool there was still the girl who'd eaten cereal at eleven at night and cried at snooker documentaries. "You'd have been good," she said. "That's the thing I can't put down. You'd have been so good at it. You could see round corners. Bell said it, everyone said it—" "Everyone said a lot of things." "—and now you're carrying sweet and sour up four flights for a bag of crisps." "Two orders," Rory said. "Same building, different floors."