AI Rain had turned the neon green, then greener, running down the window in long lit threads, and Rory watched it while she counted her tips on the bar, which was a thing Silas allowed only because she'd never once asked permission.
Eleven pounds forty in coins. A folded fiver with a phone number on it, which she left in the ashtray they used for bottle caps.
"Slow night," Silas said. He was drying glasses with a towel that had been white in some earlier era. The signet ring caught the lamplight each time his hand turned, a small silver wink, over and over, like a lighthouse.
"It's Tuesday. In November."
"That's my point. Tuesday in November is a good night for a bar." He set the glass on the shelf, rim down. "Nobody comes in on a Tuesday in November unless they mean it."
The door went. Cold came in first, and the smell of wet pavement and someone else's cigarette, and then a woman in a camel coat shaking out an umbrella that had clearly been bought at a station, one spoke bent into a shrug.
She looked around the room the way people did the first time — the walls furred with old maps, Antwerp and the Hindu Kush and a nautical chart of the Skagerrak, the black-and-white photographs of men in bad suits standing in front of buildings that no longer existed. She looked at the bar. She looked at Rory.
"Oh my God," said Meredith Pugh. "Rory Carter."
Rory's hands went still over her coins. It was one of those moments where the body decides before the mind does: her shoulders had already dropped, her weight had already shifted to the balls of her feet, and some small vicious part of her had already measured the distance to the door.
"Merry."
"Merry." Merry laughed, a short disbelieving bark. "Nobody's called me that in — God. Years." She came forward with her hand out, then thought better of it halfway and turned it into a hug, awkward across the bar stool, her wet coat cold against Rory's forearm. She smelled of nothing. That was the first strange thing. Merry Pugh had always smelled of Marlboro Lights and Impulse body spray and the inside of a taxi.
"You're in London," Rory said.
"Two days. Conference at the Bloomsbury, all about trauma-informed intake, which sounds like nothing and is actually everything, and I got out of the drinks thing early because I can't do drinks things, and I walked, and it was raining, and there was a green sign." She unbuttoned her coat . Underneath it was a jumper the colour of oatmeal and, on her left hand, a wedding band, thin, worn thin, worn every day. "Are you working? Are you the barmaid? Rory Carter, barmaid."
"No. I live upstairs." She gathered the coins into her palm. "I deliver food. Golden Empress, on Gerrard Street. Best sweet-and-sour in the city and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
She watched Merry's face do the arithmetic. It did it quickly and hid it badly.
"Right," Merry said. "Good. That's — you always said you'd rather do anything than law."
"I did say that."
Silas set a glass of water in front of Merry without being asked , the lemon already in it, and moved down the bar to the till, where he became furniture. He had a genius for that. Rory had watched him do it to a Home Office undersecretary once, become so thoroughly a piece of the room that the man had said things he shouldn't have for forty minutes straight.
"You look well," Rory said, and meant it, and it came out like an accusation anyway.
"I look older."
"You look like someone who sleeps."
"Six years sober in February," Merry said, matter-of-fact, the way you'd say the boiler was serviced in February. "And there's a two-year-old, so the sleeping's a lie, but yes." She turned the water glass a quarter-turn on the wood. "I'm at Cardiff Women's Aid. Intake and advocacy. I do the first conversation. The one where they come in and they don't know what to call it yet."
Rory looked at her. Merry Pugh, who had once driven a Fiesta into a bollard outside the Students' Union at four in the morning and laughed so hard she wet herself. Merry Pugh, who had lost two phones in one week and never found either. Merry Pugh, in oatmeal, doing the first conversation.
"That's good work," Rory said.
"It's the only work." Merry drank some water. "God, it's a weird thing to say to you."
"Why."
There it was, then: the pause with weight in it, the kind that has a shape, that you could put your hand on. Behind Rory, the fridge hummed. Somewhere in the back a pipe ticked as it cooled.
"Because I was rubbish," Merry said.
"Merry—"
"No, let me. I've had this conversation in my head about four hundred times and it's always in a café, so a bar's fitting, isn't it." She laughed without anything in it. "Spring, final year. You came round mine on a Sunday and you had your sunglasses on inside and your lip was — and you said you'd walked into the wardrobe door."
"I did walk into a wardrobe door."
"And I said, God, Rory, you absolute liability, and I made you a coffee and I put a film on and I didn't ask you one single question. Not one." Merry's thumb went round the rim of the glass. "And three weeks later you were gone. Gone gone. Eva said London and everyone said London and your mam wouldn't say anything to anyone, and I remember thinking — I remember thinking, she could have said goodbye."
Rory put the coins in her pocket. It took her longer than it needed to.
"I couldn't," she said.
"I know. I know that now. It's literally my job to know it now. I sit in a room and a woman tells me she walked into a wardrobe door and I think about you, every single time, and I ask the question." Merry's eyes were wet and she was ignoring it with great professionalism. "I got very good at asking the question because of you. Which is a horrible thing to owe someone."
The rain thickened against the glass. Out on the street two men went past under one jacket held over their heads, shouting at each other cheerfully.
"You weren't rubbish," Rory said. "You were nineteen."
"I was twenty-one."
"You were nineteen in your soul." Merry snorted, and something in the room let go a notch. Rory turned her wrist over on the bar without deciding to, the small crescent scar white against the skin, and Merry saw it and her whole face changed, softened into something younger.
"The tree," she said.
"The tree."
"That branch was rotten. I still say it. I've said it at parties. I say, my friend Rory nearly died in the Ellises' garden because of arboreal negligence, and nobody ever laughs."
"Nobody laughs because you tell it too long."
"I tell it exactly the right length."
They sat with it. It was easy for four seconds and then it wasn't, because that was the thing nobody told you about old friends: the easiness was still in there, perfectly preserved, and you could reach it, and then you had to come back up through six years of water.
"He's engaged," Merry said.
Rory didn't move. She was aware of Silas, thirty feet away, not looking up, and of her own pulse , unhurried, and of the fact that she was not afraid, which was itself a piece of information she filed away for later, to take out and turn over when she was alone.
"Okay," she said.
"I wasn't sure whether to. I've been standing at that door for about a minute deciding."
"No, it's — okay." Rory reached for a coaster, and Silas' pen, which lived behind the till and which Silas would want back. She wrote seven digits, then her name, because she had learned to sign things. "That's me. I'm terrible at phones. I'll answer eventually."
Merry took it and looked at it a long moment, as though it were a document she had to certify.
"You changed," she said.
"So did you."
"Yeah, but I got better." Merry put the coaster in her coat pocket, carefully , all the way down. "You got harder."
"Same thing," Rory said, "from the outside."
Merry left the water half-finished and the umbrella behind, and at the door she turned and said, "Sunday, though. You'd have liked me on the Sunday," and was gone into the green light and the rain.
Silas came down the bar. He picked up the abandoned glass and looked into it for a while, the way other men looked at the sea.
"Old friend," Rory said.
"Yes," he said. "You can always tell. Nobody else gets to hurt you that tidily." He put the glass in the sink. "Upstairs. I'll bring you something hot and you can tell me nothing about it."
She went, taking the umbrella with her, one spoke bent, ridiculous, hers now.