Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRN9C8SY2MR0N9NME1QFM6

Rain came off Dean Street in sheets, and every third person who pushed through the door of the Raven's Nest shook themselves like a dog and apologised to nobody. Rory had the towel over her shoulder and Silas's ledger open on the bar because he refused to use the till's report function, said it lied. Tuesday. Eleven customers, four of them the same four who came every Tuesday, one of them asleep under the photograph of a bombed-out Dresden. The door went again. Rory didn't look up. "Two minutes, I'll be with you." "You're behind a bar." She knew the vowels before she knew the voice. Cardiff, but sanded — the edges taken off the way people took them off when they moved east and got tired of being asked to say things twice. Nia Prosser stood dripping on the mat in a camel coat that had cost more than Rory's month. Hair cut to the jaw, blow-dried straight, the kind of straight that needed appointments. A leather folio under one arm. A wedding band, thin, plain, and a second ring above it with a stone in it that caught the green of the neon through the window. "Bloody hell," Rory said. "Yeah." Nia didn't move from the mat. "I walked past twice. I thought, that's not her. And then I thought, that's absolutely her, she's got the towel thing." "The towel thing." "You did it in the Woodville. Third year. You wiped that table for nine minutes because you didn't want to talk to Gareth." "Gareth had opinions about Nietzsche." "Gareth had opinions about everything." Nia came forward at last and put the folio on the bar and stood with her hands flat either side of it, like a woman about to make an offer on a house. Up close her face was the same and not. Fuller. Better slept. The little scar through her eyebrow from the bike still there, silvered. Rory poured her a whisky without asking, then stopped with the bottle tilted. "Do you still—" "I still." Nia took it. "Don't look so relieved. I have three of these a year and I bill for the hangover." At the far end of the bar Silas moved a glass an inch to the left, which was his way of saying he was listening. His signet ring clicked once on the wood. Rory ignored him. "You're in London." "Since 2019. Islington. Well — Finsbury Park, but I say Islington to my mother-in-law." Nia drank. Her throat worked. "God, that's foul. You're in London." "Since a while." "Since a while." Nia set the glass down with great care, the way you set down something you might otherwise throw. "Four years, Rory. Four years and a bit. Your number went dead in the March. I rang your mam." "I know you rang my mam." "She told me you were 'having a bit of a rest.'" The words came out flattened, courtroom-flat. "Jennifer Carter said her daughter was having a bit of a rest and then she asked me about my dissertation." Rory found something to do with the ledger. The column of figures blurred and reassembled. "She didn't know where I was either. Not for a bit." "You could have texted me one word. One. 'Fine.' I'd have taken 'fine.'" Nia turned the whisky glass a quarter-turn. "I'd have known it was a lie and I'd have taken it." The man under Dresden snored and shifted. Somebody outside dragged a suitcase over the kerb, and the wheels made a sound like tearing. "You look like a solicitor," Rory said. "I am a solicitor." "You were going to Lisbon." "I was going to Lisbon." Nia laughed, one syllable, no warmth in it and no bitterness either, just the noise you make at a thing you've stopped arguing with. "I was going to Lisbon and I was going to write eighty poems and live off olives. Do you remember the flat? The one with the blue tiles, the picture I had on my wall?" "You made me look at that picture every day for two years." "I sold my car for the deposit and then Dad had his stroke, and by the time he could hold a fork again the flat was gone and the poems were — " she opened one hand, closed it. "I did a training contract in Bristol. I was good at it. Turns out that's what happens if you're good at something. People pay you to keep doing it until you can't remember wanting anything else." "You've got a garden." "I've got a garden," Nia said. "How did you know I've got a garden?" "You've got the hands of a woman with a garden." Nia looked at her own hands, surprised, and something young came into her face and went out again. "Roses. Which is the most humiliating possible hobby. Owen bought me secateurs for my birthday and I cried." "Owen." "Married him in the Vale. Two hundred people. My cousins did a conga." Her eyes came up. "I sent an invitation to your parents' address." Rory kept her face level. "I know." "You know." "Mam kept it. She gave it to me last Christmas in a Tupperware with a load of other post." The towel had come off her shoulder and she was folding it into smaller and smaller squares. "I sat in the car and read it in the Asda car park." "And?" "And it was a lovely invitation. Letterpress." "Aurora." Nobody used her whole name. It landed in her like a stone into a well and she felt the splash go all the way down. "I couldn't have come," Rory said. "In the November. I couldn't have got on a train in the November." Nia's jaw shifted. She reached for the whisky and didn't pick it up. "Because of him." "Because of him." "I asked you." Her voice dropped, and the drop was worse than volume. "In the Pen and Wig, do you remember, the night of the mooting thing, and you had that mark on your arm and you said the boot of the car had come down on it, and I said Rory, and you looked at me like I'd spat in your drink. And I let it go. I let it go because you're — " she gestured at all of Rory, the whole length of her — "because you're the cleverest person I know and I thought, well, if it were that, she'd know. She'd have worked it out before me." "That's not how it works." "No," Nia said. "I've since done a course." The laugh got out of Rory before she could stop it, and Nia's mouth twitched, and for a second the two of them were nineteen in a kitchen that smelled of Lambert & Butler and burnt toast. Then it passed and the bar came back, the maps, the rain, the green light lying in a stripe along the wet shoulder of that camel coat. Rory pushed the glass an inch towards her. "Drink your foul whisky." "Is he — " Nia stopped. "Is that finished. Him." "He's in Cardiff. I'm here." Rory turned her left wrist over, absently, the way she did, thumb finding the small crescent scar she'd had since she was six and a bike and a wall. "I do deliveries for a Chinese place on Gerrard Street. Six days some weeks. I live upstairs, above this." Nia looked at the ceiling. Then at the bookshelf against the back wall, the one that sat a half-inch proud of the plaster and always had. "Above a bar," she said. "Above a very good bar," Silas said, without turning round.