Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCR95FNYV5E7WXBBDPJ5V63

The rain had stopped an hour ago but the green neon still bled across the wet pavement outside, so that anyone stepping into The Raven's Nest arrived faintly seasick with colour. Rory came down the back stairs in her delivery jacket, the reflective strips scuffed to grey, her hair flat against her skull. She smelled of black bean sauce and diesel. Silas didn't look up from the glass he was drying. "Bad night?" "Somebody in Bloomsbury ordered forty pounds of food and gave the wrong postcode. Twice." She hooked a stool with her foot. "Half a lager. I'll pay you Friday." "You'll pay me never and we'll both pretend otherwise." He poured. The bar had four people in it and three of them were the same three as always, hunched under the old Ordnance Survey maps like men studying the routes out. The fourth stood at the far end near the bookshelf, coat over one arm, phone to her ear, saying *no, no, tell him I'll take the papers home*, and Rory knew the voice before she'd fully turned her head. Fifteen years of it. The vowels ironed out now, Cardiff sanded down to something that would play in a magistrates' court. "Nia." The phone came away from her ear. She had the look of someone recalibrating, a fraction of a second where the eyes go somewhere else and come back. Then she laughed, and the laugh was the same, too loud for a room this size. "Christ. *Rory*." "You're in my pub." "Your—" Nia looked around, took in the photographs, the tobacco-coloured ceiling. "This is a pub? I thought we'd wandered into somebody's grandad's front room." "He's standing right there." "I heard it," Silas said, and moved off down the bar with the cloth. Nia came the length of the room and stopped a foot short, arms half-lifting, then hugged her hard and quick, the way you do when you've decided in the last second to commit. Her coat was good wool. There was a ring on her, a plain band, and a second one above it with a stone that caught the neon and threw it back green. "You're wet," Nia said. "I'm always wet. It's a whole thing now." Rory sat back down. "Leaving drinks?" "How did you—" "You've got a name badge on a lanyard in your pocket and you've been on the phone about papers at half eleven at night. Also you're wearing shoes you can't walk in." Nia looked down at the shoes. "They were a gift." "From?" "Owen." "That's a ring, is it." "That's a ring." She said it as though owning up to something. She set her coat on the stool beside Rory instead of taking the stool herself, and stood, one elbow on the bar, angled towards the door. "Two years in March. Registry office. Small. It was—" She stopped. "It was small," Rory said. "It was small." Silas set down a glass of red without being asked, and Nia looked at it and then at him with a flicker of unease, the sort people get when a stranger has read them accurately. "You didn't ask what I wanted." "You were looking at the bottle." "He does that," Rory said. "You get used to it." Nia drank. Her throat moved. Rory watched her look at the delivery jacket, at the phone in the plastic pouch strapped to Rory's chest, at the crescent scar on her wrist which had been there since they were nine and a garden wall. "So," Nia said. "You're—" "Deliveries. Golden Empress, on Gerrard Street. Twenty-two hours a week, sometimes more when Yu-Fei's short." "Right." "You can say the thing." "I wasn't going to say a thing." "You were doing the face." "I don't have a face." Nia turned the glass a quarter-turn on the bar, then another. "Your mam told my mam you were doing something in publishing." "My mam tells your mam a lot of things." "She said a flat in Islington." "It's a flat above this. There's one radiator and it clangs like a foundry." Rory drank. "But there's a fire escape and nobody knows the address, so." That landed in the room and sat there. Nia's eyes went to the bottles and stayed. "You finished, though. The degree." "Third year, two terms in. I didn't finish." "You were the best of us. Weston used to read your essays out." "Weston read one essay out and it was to demonstrate a comma splice." "That's not how I remember it." "You remember what you like remembering," Rory said, and heard how it came out, and didn't take it back. Nia's jaw shifted. She was very still for someone who used to be incapable of sitting through a film. "Go on then." "Nothing." "No, go on. You've been sat there four minutes waiting to say it." "I've been sat here four minutes trying not to." "That's not the same as not wanting to." Nia turned to face her properly for the first time, and the coat slid off the stool and neither of them picked it up. "Say it." Rory ran her thumb along the rim of the glass. Down the bar one of the regulars laughed at something on the radio and the sound seemed to come from a long way off, another country. "You rang me twice in the November," she said. "The second time I picked up and I couldn't say anything and you said *Rory, are you there,* and I hung up. And then you didn't ring again." "You told me not to." "I did tell you not to." "You sent a text at two in the morning saying leave it, and then another one saying you were fine, and then you changed your number." Nia's voice had gone quiet and flat, the courtroom voice, the one for facts. "I drove to Cathays. I sat outside that house for an hour. His car was there." "You never said." "What was I going to say? I sat outside your house and then I went home?" She picked up the wine and put it down without drinking. "I was twenty-two. I thought you'd ring when you wanted to ring." "I know." "You didn't ring." "No." "Five years, Rory." "Six in April." Nia laughed then, one short exhalation with nothing in it. "Six in April. You always did keep the ledger." "Somebody has to." "That's the thing I couldn't stand about you," Nia said. "Not the essays. The ledger. Everything filed, everything remembered, and never a word about any of it until you'd already made your decision and gone." She looked at the maps on the wall, the pins in them, the routes. "I got the pupillage. Chambers on Fetter Lane. I do housing possession mostly, some family. Landlords, mainly. I'm good at it." "I know. I looked you up." "When?" "Loads of times," Rory said. "There's a photograph of you on the website where you look like you're about to evict me." "That photograph cost four hundred pounds." "It shows." Nia's mouth moved, and for a second the whole ironed-out surface of her broke and there was the girl from the garden wall, snorting, sixteen and appalling. Then she got hold of it again, and reached down, and picked her coat up off the floor.