Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR63G8G4ANCQGGSXDJY8WZ

The rain had come in sideways off Old Compton Street, and Rory shouldered through the door of the Nest with two carrier bags of Yu-Fei's food held above her head like a man fording a river. "Bar," Silas called from the back, "not the flat." "I know where the bar is." She set the bags down on the counter, and the green light off the sign outside slid across the wet shoulders of her jacket. "Duck for six, no plum sauce, because apparently your poker friends have opinions now." "Kenneth has opinions. The rest just nod." She was unknotting the plastic when the door went again, and a woman came in stamping water off a pair of heeled boots that had never been intended for weather. "God, this city," the woman said, to no one, to the room. Then she looked up. Rory's hands stopped inside the bag. The woman had a camel coat, belted, and hair the colour of good whisky where it used to be black with a streak of green through the front. Fifteen stone of confidence in a nine-stone frame. Her mouth opened, and for a second nothing came out of it, which was itself remarkable. "Aurora Carter." "Nia." "Aurora *Carter*." Nia crossed the floor with her hand out, then didn't shake, just took Rory's wrist and turned it over, thumb finding the small white crescent there like a coin in a pocket. "You still have it." "Scars are permanent. It's sort of the point." "Off the wall at your nan's. You went over the top of it because Rhys said you wouldn't." Nia let go. Her nails were the colour of a nude lipstick, filed square. "Eight years." "Seven." "Seven, then. You're counting." "I'm good with numbers." Rory pulled out the foil trays and stacked them, four, five, six. Behind her Silas had found something to polish that did not need polishing. Nia looked around the bar — at the maps furred with damp, the photographs of men in overcoats standing beside cars that no longer existed. "This is a *place*, isn't it. I'm meeting a client at half eight and I thought I'd sit somewhere with no exposed filament bulbs. Look at that. First time in years I've got something right." "You're a client-meeting person now." "Rees Hallam. Property. I do the bit where the money moves." She smiled and it was a whole thing, practised, expensive. "Don't look at me like that." "Like what?" "Like I've sold something." Nia hitched onto the stool beside the food, coat still belted. "You want a drink? I'm buying, you're — what are you, waitressing?" "Delivering." "Delivering." "Golden Empress. Wardour Street." Rory tore the receipt off the top bag and set it flat under the pepper grinder so it wouldn't lift. "Twenty minutes door to door. I'm very fast." Nia didn't say anything. She unbelted her coat, which was a way of not saying anything, and shrugged out of it, and underneath she was in a grey dress that had been chosen by a person with a mirror and time. "Two of whatever's not terrible," she said to Silas. "I'll pick," Silas said, and set the glasses down and moved to the other end of the bar with his limp doing its slow work, far enough to be gone, near enough to hear. Nia turned the glass a quarter turn without drinking. "Your dad's still at the Bar." "Silks last year." "Christ, and he told you." "My mother told me. He sent a photograph of himself in the wig." Rory finally sat, one stool's distance, coat dripping onto the boards. "I did tell him it was very fetching." "You didn't go." "There was a lunch. There were a hundred and forty barristers at the lunch. I didn't think anyone would miss the daughter who dropped out." "*I* missed you." It came out too fast and too flat, and Nia heard it herself, and drank to cover it. "That's a thing I've wanted to say for a while and it sounded better in my head." "Most things do." "You didn't leave a number." "I left a country." "You left in the middle of a *Tuesday*, Rory. Your kettle was still warm. Eva rang me and said don't ask, and I said don't be ridiculous, and she said don't *ask*, and so I didn't ask, and I've been not asking for seven years." Nia set the glass down. "So. There. I'm asking." Behind them, one of Silas' clocks made a small effortful noise. "You know already," Rory said. "I know some." "Then you know." "I want you to say it, because if you say it I'm allowed to be sorry properly, and if you don't say it I have to keep being sorry in the abstract, and it's exhausting, and honestly, Rory, it's been very bad for my skin." Nia laughed at herself, once, and it broke somewhere in the middle. "He was my cousin's mate. I brought him to the thing at the boathouse. I put a drink in his hand and I said, this is Aurora, be nice, she's clever, she'll eat you alive." "You did say that." "I remember exactly what I said. That's the trouble with me." Nia's thumb went round the rim of the glass. "You had the mark on your jaw at Bethan's twenty-first and you said hockey and I said, oh, right, hockey." "You did." "Because it was easier." "Because I'd have denied it," Rory said. "If you'd pushed, I'd have gone cold and I'd have been fine for six weeks and then I'd have stopped answering. That's what I did to Eva. Twice. She only got me out because she stopped asking questions and turned up with a van." "So it wouldn't have mattered." "I didn't say that." Rory looked at her then, straight on. "It would have mattered. It just wouldn't have worked." Nia sat with that. Somewhere out on the street a taxi laid on its horn and a group of men laughed the way men laugh in the rain, and the green sign hummed above the door. "You've changed," Rory said. "I've got a mortgage and a hairdresser." "That's not what I meant." "I know what you meant." Nia straightened a fork that didn't need straightening. "I used to be the brave one. Do you remember? I got us into Clwb at sixteen. I told your father to his face that pre-law would kill you, at his own table, over his own lamb." "You did." "And then the one time it counted I said *oh, right, hockey*, and went and got another drink." She looked up. "Now I'm the person who makes money move. It's a very clean job. Nobody bleeds." Rory reached over and took Nia's glass, and drank from it, and put it back down in the wet ring it had left. "That was mine." "You weren't using it."