Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRP0PKWEFH7A07CK1T7PKE

Rain had been coming down since four, and by nine the gutters on Frith Street ran like small brown rivers. The green neon over the door threw its light onto the wet pavement, and people passed through it without stopping, hoods up, shoulders hunched. Then one of them stopped. Rory heard the door before she saw anything. She was at the end of the bar with a shoebox of receipts and a chewed pencil, splitting Yu-Fei's Tuesday takings into two piles that refused to agree with each other. "God, that's better." A woman shook her umbrella out over the mat, which was Silas' one rule and the one nobody obeyed. "Sorry. Sorry. Do you do food, or is that—" "Crisps," Silas said, from under the bar. "Three flavours. Two of them are the same." "I'll take the third." She peeled back her hood. Rory's pencil stopped moving. Nia Prydderch had cut her hair. That was the first thing — the black rope she used to wear over one shoulder in the law library was gone, replaced by something blunt and expensive that ended at the jaw. She'd got taller somehow, or it was the coat, a grey wool thing with the collar turned up, and shoes that didn't belong in Soho on a wet Tuesday. She set a leather bag on the stool beside her with the care of someone whose bag cost more than the stool. "Wine," she said. "Red. I don't care." "You will," Silas said, and poured her something anyway. Rory considered the door to the back stairs. Eleven steps, a bookshelf, a room with no windows. She had got very good, over three years, at being somewhere else. Nia turned her head to look at the wall of photographs and saw her instead. Nothing happened for a second. Then the glass went down on the bar without being drunk from, and she said, "No." "Hiya, Nia." "No." Nia was off the stool. "You're— Rory. Aurora bloody Carter." She crossed the four feet of floorboard and stopped short, hands half up, like she'd come to a fence. "I've been looking for you for three years." "I know." "You know." Nia's arms dropped. "Right. Well. That's—" She laughed, one flat note. "That's honest, at least." "Sit down. You're dripping on the receipts." Nia sat. She looked at Rory the way she used to look at case law she suspected of lying to her — front to back, twice. Rory let her. She was aware, in a distant way, of the state of her own hands: knuckles chapped from the moped handlebars, a thumbnail split, a smear of hoisin on the cuff of a fleece with GOLDEN EMPRESS stitched over the heart. "You've got shorter hair than me," Nia said. "You've got better hair than me." "I've got a mortgage in Bermondsey and a man who irons his own shirts. The hair's the least of it." She picked up her wine, finally, and drank half. "Your mother rang my mother. Did you know that? Christmas, the first year. Standing in the hall with the cordless, asking if I'd heard anything, and my mam saying no, love, no, nothing, and doing that face at me over the top of it." "I sent them a card." "A card." Nia put the glass down. "From Bruges." "It wasn't Bruges." "I know it wasn't Bruges, Rory, that's my point." Her voice climbed and she pulled it back down, glancing at Silas, who had developed a sudden interest in the glass-washer. "Sorry. I'm not— I've had a day. I've been in a room in Aldgate since eight this morning learning about anti-money-laundering compliance and I only came in here because of the sign." "The sign gets everyone." "It's a good sign." Nia turned her glass by the base. "Third year I stopped looking. I want you to know that, because I think it's the worst thing I've done. I made a decision on a Tuesday, in a meeting, and the decision was: she doesn't want to be found. And then I felt better. That's the bit I can't—" She stopped. "Anyway. You look well." "I look knackered." "You look like someone who's slept, though." Nia said it quietly. "That's new." Rory turned a receipt over. Sixteen forty for a delivery to Greek Street; the man had tipped in twenty-pence pieces and she'd carried them up the stairs in her fist. "He came to my flat," Nia said. "Evan. Two weeks after. Stood on the step with a bag of your things and asked me to talk sense into you." "What did you say?" "I made him tea." Nia's mouth twisted. "I made the man tea, Rory. I sat him at my table and I said I was sure it would all blow over, and he cried, and I felt sorry for him. It was February and I had my whole life in front of me and I sat there being kind to him." "You didn't know." "Don't." Nia's hand came down flat on the bar. "Don't be gracious about it. I saw your wrist in Wetherspoons in the November and I said nothing, because it was easier to believe you about the door frame. I've built quite a career on noticing what's in front of me and I didn't notice you." She reached out, then, and took Rory's left hand, and turned it, thumb moving over the small pale crescent below the heel of it. "This one I know. Nan's greenhouse. You were eight." "Nine." "Nine." Nia let go. "The other ones I don't know." The rain hit the window in a handful and slid. Silas set two glasses upside down on the towel and left through the door beside the bookshelf without a word, which was, Rory understood, his version of a hand on the shoulder. "Who's he?" Nia said. "Landlord." "That's not what he is." "No." Nia waited. Rory said nothing else, and watched Nia file that away somewhere, the way she'd file a witness going quiet. "You'd have been called by now," Nia said at last. "You know that. You'd have finished pupillage in the spring, you'd be doing your first magistrates' court, you'd be complaining about it. Bethan's at 3 Verulam. She asks after you. She asks in this careful way, like your name's a bruise." "I hated it." "You were better at it than me." "That's not the same thing, Nia." "No." Nia looked at the fleece, the stitched name over the heart, and Rory watched her decide not to say the obvious thing, and then say it anyway, because she'd never in her life managed the swallow. "Do you like it? The— this?" "I know every street in three postcodes." Rory shrugged. "Nobody knows where I am unless I want them to. Old ladies give me biscuits. Yu-Fei shouts at me in two languages." She looked up. "Yes. I like it." "Right," Nia said, and her eyes were wet, and she hated it, Rory could see, the way she pressed the back of her wrist under one and then the other, briskly, like sorting post. "Right. Well. Nobody warns you. That it goes. Three years, and it's not that I forgot you, it's that I got used to the shape of the space." She sniffed hard. "I got used to it. That's the confession, if you want one." "I'm not a priest." "You'd be a terrible priest." Nia laughed, properly this time, and drank the rest of the wine in one. "Pour me another. And come round this side of the bar and sit with me, for God's sake. You're stood there like you're taking a statement."