Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRFJ5AV9256KP279VNTXXY

The green neon buzzed like a trapped wasp, and Rory came down the back stairs into it with her hair still damp, three quid in her pocket and a hunger for chips she had no intention of satisfying. Wednesday. The Nest held six people and a smell of wet wool. Silas stood at the taps with a cloth in one hand and a glass in the other, working them together the way other men worked worry beads. "Someone's been asking after you," he said, without looking up. "Asking how?" "By name. Both of them." He tipped his chin toward the far end, past the framed map of the Danube with the pin holes in it. "Sat down at half five and hasn't touched the second one." The woman on the last stool had her back to the room. Camel coat folded over her knees like something she'd been asked to mind. Blonde gone honey-dark at the roots, cut blunt at the jaw. She turned, and Rory's stomach dropped through the floorboards and into the cellar. "There she is," Delyth said. "Aurora bloody Carter." "Del." "I nearly walked past. I thought, no, that's not her, she'd never live above a pub." Delyth stood, then didn't seem to know what to do with her arms, so she put one around Rory's shoulders and squeezed like she was testing fruit. She smelled of something expensive and clean. "You're thinner." "You're a blonde." "I was a blonde. I'm a woman with a bad hairdresser in Pontcanna." She sat back down and pushed the untouched gin along the bar. "That's yours if you want it. I ordered it out of habit and then remembered." "Remembered what?" Delyth put her hand flat on her stomach, under the swell of a jumper Rory had taken for a jumper. "Nineteen weeks." Rory looked at the hand. The ring on it. Two rings. "Right," she said. "That's it? Right?" "Congratulations." She pulled out the stool and sat, and the gin stayed where it was, between them, sweating. "Who is he?" "Owen. Owen Hughes. He does something with wind farms that I've stopped pretending to understand." Delyth's mouth twisted. "You met him. At Jules' thing. He had a shaved head and a bad shirt." "I don't remember Jules' thing." "No," Delyth said. "You wouldn't." Silas set a glass of tap water down at Rory's elbow without a word and moved off to the other end of the bar, where he became a man very interested in a broken till. Rory drank half of it. The room's low light did something kind to Delyth's face and something less kind to the silence. "I'm here for a conference," Delyth said. "Employment law. Three days of men in Farah trousers explaining tribunals to me. I walked out of the hotel and I thought, I'll get lost in Soho, that's a thing people do. And then I saw the sign. Green. Like a chemist's." "And you asked for me by name." "I asked the bloke if a Welsh girl lived upstairs. He said no. Then he said, an Irish-Welsh girl, maybe." She smiled at the bar. "That's very Rory, that. Splitting the difference so nobody can hold you to it." "He's careful." "He's a doorman with a signet ring." Delyth traced the rim of the gin she wasn't drinking. "You went dark. Your hair, I mean. And everything else. Six years, Aurora. I sent letters to your mam's." "She gave them to me." "You didn't open them." "I opened them." Delyth waited. "I opened them and I put them in the drawer with the bank stuff," Rory said. "That's not the same as reading them, I know. Don't look at me like a jury." "I don't have a jury face." "You've had a jury face since second year." That got a laugh out of Delyth, short and unwilling, and for a second she was twenty and standing on a table in the Woodville with somebody's tie round her head. Then the laugh went out of her the way a match goes out and she was a solicitor from Pontcanna with a mortgage and nineteen weeks. "I made partner," she said. "Junior partner. There's a photograph of me on a wall in Cathedral Road with my chin up like a bloody figurehead." "You wanted that." "I wanted to be Erin Brockovich. I settle car park disputes for a supermarket chain." Delyth turned on the stool to face her properly. "What do you do?" "Deliveries." "Deliveries." "Chinese food. Golden Empress, Gerrard Street. Yu-Fei pays cash and doesn't mind if I'm late." Rory kept her voice flat and let it sit there in the open, a small ugly object on the bar between them. "Evenings mostly. Bike's out back with a milk crate zip-tied to it." Delyth's throat moved. "You were top of the year." "I was second." "You were top of the year and you sat in the Aberdare with a highlighter and told me the whole of Donoghue v Stevenson from memory to win a pint." "And I lost the pint because I got the year wrong." "1932." "1932." Rory smiled at the water glass. "There you go." "Don't do that." Delyth's voice came out sharper than the room, and two of the six people looked over. She dropped it. "Don't be charming at me. I've come a hundred and fifty miles to sit in a bar that smells like a coat, and you're being charming at me." "What do you want, Del?" "I want to know why you didn't ring me." "You know why." "I don't." "You do." Rory turned her water glass a quarter turn on the wood. "August. The garden at Fiona's. You had a bottle of white in your hand and I told you what he did to my arm and you said—" "Don't." "You said, everyone rows." Delyth looked at the taps. The neon lay green along the side of her face and made her look drowned. "I know what I said." "You said it kindly," Rory said. "That's the part I couldn't get past. You said it like you were doing me a favour. Like I'd embarrassed myself and you were helping me tidy it up." "I was twenty-three." "So was I." "I've thought about it—" Delyth stopped and started again, lower. "There's a version of that night where I put the bottle down. I've had it in my head for six years. I put the bottle down and I say, right, we're going, get your bag. And you're a solicitor now and I'm the one on a bike." "That's not how it went." "No." Delyth pressed her thumb hard into the base of her own palm. "You went to London and Eva found you a room and nobody told me where. Your mam wouldn't say. I stood in her kitchen and she gave me a Welsh cake and she wouldn't say." "I asked her not to." "I know." "It wasn't punishment." "It felt like one." Delyth's eyes were wet and she didn't wipe them, which was new; the old Delyth would have made a production of it, would have got everyone in the bar involved. "I'd have taken punishment. Punishment's a conversation." Rory pushed her sleeve up without deciding to. The crescent on her left wrist, white as a nail paring, older than either of them — the coal bunker, age seven, her mother's scream from the back step. "That's the wrong one," Delyth said. "I know which one it is." "I meant—" "I know what you meant." Silas came past with a crate of empties, his weight going down and up on the bad knee, and set two clean glasses in front of them without asking.