AI The rain had stopped by the time Rory got back, but it hadn't finished with her; it kept dripping out of her hair and down the back of her collar as though it had made a home there. She dumped the insulated bag by the door of the Raven's Nest, where the green neon laid a sick underwater light over the wet pavement, and stood for a second with her palms on her knees, breathing.
"Sweet and sour?" Silas said, without looking up from the glass he was polishing .
"Bloke on Meard Street ordered enough for six and answered the door in a dressing gown. Alone." She peeled off her jacket . "He tipped me eight quid and asked if I wanted to stay for the football."
"And you said?"
"I said I've got a bar downstairs where nobody makes me watch anything."
Silas set the glass down and reached for the bottle without being asked — the cheap Bushmills, not the good stuff, because it was Tuesday. Rory climbed onto the stool at the crook of the bar, the one that let her see the door and the till and the corner where the map of pre-war Vienna had gone the colour of weak tea. The Nest was almost empty. Two men in the back arguing quietly about a horse. A woman with a paperback pretending to read it.
She was three sips in when the door swung and let in the smell of wet street, and a woman came in shaking out an umbrella with an efficiency that suggested she had been raised by someone who cared about floors.
It took Rory a full second. That was the thing she would think about later, lying in the flat above with the neon buzzing through the curtain: that it took her a whole second.
The hair was the first betrayal. Cerys Prydderch had spent her twentieth year with hair the colour of a traffic cone and a fringe she cut herself with kitchen scissors in the bathroom of the house on Wyeverne Road. This woman's hair was long and expensively brown and went down her back in one smooth sheet, like something poured. Camel coat. Small gold earrings. The kind of handbag that isn't a bag so much as a statement of intent about one's future.
"Cerys."
Cerys turned. Her face did three things in quick succession — blankness, calculation, and then a smile that Rory recognised, absolutely and immediately, because it was the smile Cerys used to deploy on landlords.
"Aurora," she said.
*Aurora.* Nobody had called her that since her mother's last birthday card.
"God. God, it's — I'm meeting someone here at nine, it's a work thing, and I only picked this place because—" Cerys stopped. Laughed at herself. "Because it looked like nobody I know would ever come here."
"Well," Rory said.
Cerys came over. There was a moment where they both had to decide , and they got it wrong in opposite directions, so that Rory ended up standing for a hug that arrived as a kiss on the cheek, and they both apologised. Cerys hung the camel coat on the hook by the bar as if she'd been coming here for years. Underneath it she was wearing a dress that fit her, which was somehow the most disorienting detail of all. Cerys had never in her life owned a garment that fit her.
"You look—" Cerys began.
"Wet."
"You look the same." She said it like a discovery. "You look exactly the same. That's not fair, is it. That's genuinely not fair."
Silas, unbidden, put a wine list in front of Cerys, and Cerys looked at it for two seconds and ordered a gin and tonic, and Rory watched the tiny flick of her eyes over the bottles behind the bar, the assessment and the concealment of the assessment. That was new. Cerys used to drink whatever was left in other people's cans.
"So," Cerys said. "London."
"London."
"Are you—" She was choosing . Rory could see her choosing, the way you can see a solicitor choosing. "What are you doing with yourself?"
"Deliveries," Rory said. "Chinese place round the corner. Golden Empress. Yu-Fei runs it. She shouts at me in Cantonese and I shout back in Welsh and we both find it hilarious."
"Deliveries."
"Part-time." She let that sit for a beat, enjoying it more than she should have. "I live upstairs."
"Right." Cerys took her glass when it came. Her nails were short and clean and unpainted, which was the last thing left of the girl who'd once bitten them to the quick during exams. "Right. Well. That sounds—" and then, mercifully, she gave up. "I was going to say something patronising. I've been trained to say something patronising. Sorry."
"Trained where?"
"Hartley Vance. City firm. I'm two years into a training contract and I've forgotten what daylight looks like." She turned the glass on its coaster, one quarter-turn, then another. "I do banking litigation. I don't know how to explain what that means to a normal person and I've stopped trying."
"You wanted to do immigration."
"I did want to do immigration." Cerys smiled at the coaster. "I wanted a lot of things. I wanted to live on a boat."
"You wanted to burn down the Senedd."
"I wanted to *occupy * the Senedd. There's a difference, and it's actionable." And then, unexpectedly, they were laughing , both of them, too loud for the room, and one of the men in the back looked over, and for about eleven seconds it was 2018 and there was a bottle of Lambrini on a windowsill and everything was still ahead of them.
Then it stopped, the way those things stop, and the silence that came after was worse than the silence before.
Cerys said, "I got your seat."
Rory didn't move.
"The pupillage. Bevan's chambers." Cerys was still turning the glass. "Not straight away. They held it and then they didn't and then it went out again, and I applied, and I got it, and I did eight months of it, and then I went to Hartley Vance for the money. So it turns out I didn't even want it." She looked up . "But I took it. I want you to know I know that I took it."
"It wasn't my seat," Rory said. "I never sat in it."
"You were going to."
"I was going to a lot of things." Rory turned her wrist over on the bar, the small crescent scar catching the neon, the one she'd had since she was seven and a bicycle and a low wall. "My father was going to a lot of things on my behalf. It's not the same as wanting them."
Cerys nodded. She had the grace, at least, not to argue.
Behind the bar, Silas moved along the row of taps with his slight limp, unhurried, the silver ring on his right hand clicking once against the brass, and he took away Rory's glass and put down a fresh one with about a third more in it than she'd paid for, and he didn't look at either of them while he did it. Rory could have kissed him.
"I wrote to you," Cerys said.
"I know."
"Three times. And then I stopped, because I decided you'd have got in touch if you wanted to, and that was easier for me than the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"Than the possibility that you couldn't." Cerys said it very levelly, and Rory understood that she had rehearsed it, maybe for years, in the shower, on the train, in the endless white corridors of Hartley Vance. "I saw him take hold of your arm at Ffion's. In the kitchen. And you looked at me, and I said, are you all right, and you said fine, and I said okay ." She drank. "I said *okay *, Aurora. I was twenty-two and I said okay and went back to the garden."
The two men in the back had settled their horse. The woman with the paperback had turned a page. Rory found that her thumb was moving over the crescent scar, back and forth, the way it always did, and she made it stop.
"You couldn't have done anything," she said.
"That's not the point and you know it's not the point."
"No." Rory took a breath. "No, it isn't. But I'd like it to be, for tonight, if that's all right with you."
Cerys's mouth went thin, and then she let it go, and nodded, and something eased in her shoulders that had probably been tight since about 2019.
"He's a partner's son," she said. "At my place. Not him — his cousin. But the family's in the building." She said it flatly, information, disclosure, the way you'd flag a conflict. "I think about handing in my notice roughly once a fortnight. I never do."
"Why not?"
"Because I've got a mortgage in Wandsworth and a man called Tom who wants children and a pension that vests in four years." She laughed, and there was nothing in it. "Do you know what's funny? I used to look at people like me and think, God, how did you let that happen. And it didn't happen. That's the thing nobody tells you. I chose it, four hundred times, on four hundred separate Tuesdays."
Rory looked at her — at the smooth poured hair, the small gold earrings, the coat on the hook that cost more than everything Rory owned — and felt the strangest grief, entirely disproportionate, for a girl with orange hair and kitchen scissors who did not exist anywhere except in the two of them, and would be gone completely when they were.
"You could still live on a boat," she said.
"Shut up."
"I'm serious. There's a woman moors at Little Venice, sells terrible coffee, absolute nightmare, you'd love her."
"Aurora."
"Rory," Rory said. "It's Rory. Still."
Cerys's phone lit on the bar, face-up, a name and a photograph of a man in a hard hat. She turned it over without reading it. Above the door, the green neon flickered twice, steadied, and went on humming, and neither of them said anything at all for a while, which was, Rory thought, the truest conversation they'd had in seven years.