Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5CKBQJQ8VY4P3RHN678RZ

The rain had followed Rory all the way from Frith Street, and by the time she pushed through the door of the Raven's Nest her coat was spotted dark across the shoulders. The green neon sign stuttered once as it caught the doorframe — Silas kept meaning to fix it, and never did, and she'd come to think of that flicker as a kind of welcome. The bar was nearly empty at that hour, the after-work crowd dissolved and the evening regulars not yet arrived. Silas was behind the taps, drying a glass with the unhurried competence of a man who had done a great many more dangerous things with his hands. He glanced up, gave her the small nod that was his way of saying you're late, sit down, and she was pulling off her coat when she saw the woman at the far end of the bar. For a moment she didn't recognise her. That was the thing she would think about later — that the recognition came in pieces, like a photograph developing. The hair first, because it had been long then, honey-brown and always escaping its plait, and now it was cropped short and dyed an unconvincing black at the roots. Then the posture, very straight, hands folded on the bar like someone waiting to be called into a room. And then, finally, when the woman turned her head, the profile. The small bump on the bridge of the nose from a hockey stick in Year Nine. "Nadia," Rory said, before she'd decided to say it. The woman turned all the way around. Blue-grey eyes, the same as ever, doing a slow inventory of Rory's face. "Carter," she said. "God. Rory Carter." "You look—" Rory stopped, because the honest sentence was you look like a different person, and that seemed like a poor way to begin. "I was going to say the same thing," Nadia said, and smiled, and the smile was the same, at least. Crooked on the left side. "Five years? Six?" "Six. Nearly seven." Rory crossed the room and took the stool beside her, and Silas set a glass of water in front of her without asking, which was one of the small courtesies of the Nest. "What are you doing in Soho?" "Job interview, of all things. Tomorrow morning. I needed a drink before I could be sensible about it." Nadia looked at her glass — something amber, barely touched. "And you? What are you doing here? Last I heard you were going to be a terrifying barrister like your dad. Defending the guilty and infuriating the innocent." "Something like that." Rory turned the water glass a quarter turn on the bar. "I'm a delivery driver." "A what?" "For a restaurant. Golden Empress. I bring people their food. Pad thai, mostly. Sometimes dumplings." She heard how it sounded and made herself not flinch from it. "It's not what I planned." Nadia was quiet a moment. Outside, the rain thickened against the window, and the black-and-white photographs on the walls seemed to shift in the neon light — sailors, boxers, a city none of them had ever visited. "You hated law," Nadia said at last. "You told me that the night before your first exams. You were sitting on the kitchen counter in Cathays eating cold beans out of the tin and you said, I've made a terrible mistake, and then you laughed." "I remember." "So why didn't it surprise me? When I heard you'd left Cardiff." Nadia turned the glass between her palms. "Eva told me, actually. That you'd gone to London. She wouldn't say why." Rory looked at her. The cropped hair, the careful hands, the way Nadia's eyes kept moving to the door and back, cataloguing exits. Six years ago that woman had cried at the ending of a film about a dog and once cycled the wrong way down a one-way street because she was reading a book at the time. "You've changed," Rory said. It came out blunter than she intended. "So have you." "That's fair." "No — say what you meant." Nadia's voice was still light, but there was something underneath it now, load-bearing. "You looked at me like I was a stranger wearing my coat. So go on. Ask." Rory hesitated. Then: "What happened to you?" Nadia laughed, short and dry. "What happened to me. That's a question with a long answer." She signalled to Silas for another of whatever she'd been drinking, and Silas came down the bar slowly, his limp barely noticeable unless you knew to look, and refilled the glass, and said nothing, because he never said anything unless it mattered. "My father got ill," Nadia said, when Silas had moved off again. "My turn, I mean. It was my turn. Rhys was in Australia and Dad wouldn't hear of telling him, so it was me. Two years of hospitals, Rory. Chemotherapy suites and car parks and the vending machine on the second floor that ate your pound coin if you didn't hit it in exactly the right place." She drank. "He died. Eighteen months ago now. And somewhere in the middle of all that I stopped being the person who cycled the wrong way down streets reading books, because that person was a liability. That person forgot to pay the bills. That person couldn't sit in a consultant's office and hear the word palliative and keep her voice steady." "So you became the person who keeps her voice steady." "I became the person who keeps everything steady." Nadia's mouth twisted. "It turns out it's a skill. I'm apparently very employable now. Risk assessment. Compliance. I sit in rooms and I make sure nothing unexpected happens." She looked at Rory properly then. "Your turn. Eva wouldn't say why you left, and you disappeared like someone had cut your strings. So what happened to you?" And there it was, the other side of the ledger. Rory thought of Evan's face in the yellow light of the hall in Cathays, the way she'd learned to read his moods from the weight of his footsteps. She thought of Eva sitting on her bed at four in the morning saying you have to go, you have to go now, and the train to London with everything she owned in one suitcase. She thought of the crescent scar on her wrist, which was childhood and innocent, and how she sometimes wished the whole history of her were written that legibly, so people would know without asking. "I was with someone," she said. "It was bad. Not obviously bad — that's the thing people don't understand. It was bad the way water damage is bad. Quiet. Behind the walls." She took a breath. "I left. Eva helped. I've been here three years and I'm a delivery driver and I live above a bar run by a man who used to be a spy, and I'm—" She stopped, surprised by what came next. "I'm all right. I'm actually all right." Nadia was staring at her. "A spy." "That's the part you're taking from that?" "It's a lot to take." But Nadia was almost laughing, and something in her face was loosening, the straightness of her going out of her shoulders like a knot being worked free. "Rory Carter, delivering pad thai and living above an ex-spook's bar. Your father must be beside himself." "He is. That's the worst part. He keeps sending me job listings. Pupillage openings. As if it's still just a matter of getting back on the path." Rory turned the glass again. "And maybe it is. I don't know. I used to think time was a corridor — you know, like everything was still there behind you and you could just walk back and pick things up. Law. Cardiff. Us, even. But it's not, is it. It's not a corridor." "No," Nadia said quietly. "It's more like the rain. Same water, but it never falls the same way twice." They sat with that. Silas put a bowl of nuts on the bar between them without comment, an old host's gesture, and retreated to the far taps where he could pretend not to listen. "I missed you," Nadia said. "I don't think I let myself know how much until just now. I'd see something stupid — a bad film about a dog, someone cycling the wrong way — and think, I'll text Rory, and then remember I couldn't, and not know why I couldn't." "I didn't leave because of you." "I know that now. I didn't know it then. I thought — for a while I thought everyone was someone you could be cut from." Nadia reached out and touched Rory's wrist, the scar, briefly, like a signature on a very old letter. "We were friends, weren't we. Genuinely." "We are," Rory said. "Whatever else." The rain eased. Somewhere in the back of the bar, behind the bookshelf Nadia hadn't noticed, a phone buzzed twice and went quiet. Nadia looked at her glass, then at the window, then at Rory, and the crooked smile came back — smaller, worn, but the same one. "Tell me about the spy," she said. So Rory did, and outside the neon sign flickered on and off, on and off, patient as anything, waiting to be fixed.