AI The green neon over the door of the Raven's Nest bled onto the wet pavement in a long smear, so that anyone crossing Wardour Street at a jog looked briefly like they were wading through something radioactive. Inside, the rain was a rumor. The bar smelled of old wood and spilled gin and the faint chemical sweetness of the lilies Silas replaced every Monday whether they needed it or not.
Rory sat at the far end of the bar , where the ceiling dropped and the photographs hung thickest. Prague, mostly, though she hadn't known that at first. Budapest. A man in a wool coat feeding pigeons in a square she'd never been able to identify, and had never asked about, because Silas's answers were like his whiskey — poured short and never watered.
She still had her coat on. She'd come down from the flat to put the day's receipts in the till for Yu-Fei and had stayed for the quiet, and for the second half of a whiskey she was no longer drinking. Her hair was damp at the ends from the walk back from the last delivery, a flat off Old Compton Street where a man in a dressing gown had taken his noodles without looking at her once.
Silas worked the other end of the bar , unhurried, drying a glass that was already dry. The silver ring on his right hand caught the light each time he turned it. His limp showed only when he thought no one was watching , and he thought that now, moving down the bar to check the till tape, favoring the left leg the way he always did when the weather turned.
The door opened. Cold came in like something with intentions.
The woman in the doorway was soaked through — a good coat ruined, hair plastered flat against her temples, a leather holdall held up like a shield against weather she'd already escaped. She blinked twice, letting the low light resolve into bar , and bar resolve into people, and people resolve into Rory.
Neither of them moved. The rain ran off the woman's coat and made a small dark ring on the floorboards.
"You have got to be *joking *," the woman said .
Rory set her glass down very carefully , as though it were full.
"Bethan."
"Three years." Bethan Rees crossed the room in four strides, and Rory stood, and they hugged the way people hug when they are deciding whether to. Bethan smelled of rain and expensive shampoo and something underneath it, wine. She pulled back and held Rory at arm's length and looked at her the way people look at a house they used to live in.
"You cut your hair," Bethan said.
"It was always this length."
"No, it was — " Bethan stopped. "It was longer. At the moots. You had it in that braid the whole week, the one you kept redoing in the toilets at the Union, and I said it made you look like a — "
"I remember."
Silas had already produced a bar towel, and Bethan took it and blotted at her face with the brisk, contained movements of someone who had decided not to be embarrassed. She ordered white wine, then, when Silas shook his head, a whiskey, then immediately revised it to a whiskey with ice, then to a whiskey neat, as if negotiating down through her own better judgment .
They sat. Behind Bethan, the rain had turned the window into a blurred grey sheet, and the neon sign above the door hummed its green into the room.
"God, Rory." Bethan turned her glass a quarter turn. "Three years. I looked for you, you know. After. I asked your mother. She said you needed time, and then she stopped answering, and then I got the pupillage and — " She shrugged, a small, finished movement. "Life."
"Congratulations," Rory said. "Chambers?"
"Strand. Family law." Bethan said it the way you say a thing you're proud of and slightly afraid of. "Second six now. I'm in court most weeks. It's — " She laughed, short . "It's relentless. I'm tired all the time. I'm actually — " She held up her left hand. A ring. Pale gold, a small stone. "Eight months. His name's Tom. He's a planner. Traffic infrastructure."
"Tom the traffic planner."
"He's *wonderful *."
"I'm sure he is ."
"He really is , though." Bethan drank. "He's kind. He's the kindest man I've ever met, and I keep telling people that, and they keep looking at me like I'm protesting too much, which I'm not. It's just that when you've had the other kind, you notice. You know?"
Rory didn't answer. The scar on her wrist had begun to itch the way it did when she thought about Cardiff, and she pressed her thumb against it under the bar , out of sight.
Across the room, Silas had found a reason to be polishing the shelves. He wasn't listening . He was simply present, in the way of a man who had once spent a career being present in rooms where people lied to each other, and had never quite stopped.
"You disappeared," Bethan said. "End of Hilary term, you just — I asked around. Nobody knew. Your dad wouldn't — I saw him, once, at the Temple. I said hello, and he looked at me for about four seconds like he was deciding whether to, and then he did. He was very polite. He asked after my mother." She turned the glass again . "He didn't ask about you. I don't think he could."
"He doesn't know where I live," Rory said. "That's not a tragedy. It's just a fact."
"Rory."
"Don't."
"I'm not — " Bethan put her hands up, palms out. "I'm not here to. I just — I sat in that moot court with you for four days when we were nineteen, and you took the bench apart like it was a thing you'd done in a past life, and every single person in that room knew they were watching someone who was going to be — " She stopped. "And then you were gone. And I never got to ask why."
The jukebox had run out. The bar was very quiet. Rory could hear the rain and the neon and, faintly, the pipes ticking in the wall as the old building settled into the cold.
"I got involved with someone," Rory said. "Badly. And when I left him, I had to leave everything, because he'd made everything his."
Bethan's hands went still around the glass.
"I can't tell you more than that," Rory said. "Not because I don't trust you. Because it doesn't get smaller by being said. It gets bigger."
Bethan looked at her for a long time. Then she nodded, once, and didn't ask. That was the thing about Bethan — she'd always known when a question was a door and when it was a wall. It was why she'd been so good at the moots.
"All right," she said.
"All right."
"I'm still going to be angry at you."
"That's fine."
"I'm going to be angry at you for the rest of the night." Bethan wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, quick and annoyed, and laughed. "God. Look at me. I'm a barrister. I'm about to be married. I have a direct access brief on Monday and I'm crying into whiskey in a — " She looked around properly for the first time. "What *is * this place? There are maps on the wall."
"I live upstairs."
Bethan looked at her. "You live in a *bar *."
"I live above a bar . I deliver noodles, mostly. It's — " Rory turned her glass, mirroring her. "It's quiet. It's mine. I can hear the front door from my bed, which I thought I'd hate."
They talked for another hour, and it was almost easy. Bethan told her about the pupillage interview, the one she'd botched, and the one she hadn't, and about Tom's mother's opinions on the seating plan. Rory told her about Yu-Fei, who had once chased a man down Berwick Street for a five-pound note and returned with the note and his wallet, which she had also returned, having first photographed his driving licence. They laughed. Twice, Bethan reached for her phone, and twice she turned it face down without answering, and the second time she said, too casually, "Tom worries," and Rory watched her not look at it and said nothing.
When Bethan finally pulled on her ruined coat, she took a pen out of the holdall — an old one, a cheap blue biro, the same kind they'd both used to annotate casebooks in the library at Cardiff — and wrote her number on the back of a receipt.
"Chambers," she said. "And then my flat. And the flat's a mess, and Tom's mother is staying from Thursday, but come anyway. Come on Sunday. Or don't come on Sunday. Come whenever the door's open."
Rory took the receipt.
Bethan paused in the doorway with the rain behind her. The green light came in around her, and for a second she looked nineteen again, and so did Rory, and then neither of them did.
"You should call your father," Bethan said.
"I know."
"I'm not saying you have to. I'm saying you should."
"I know."
Bethan nodded, and went out into it, and the door swung shut and took the cold with it.
Silas came down the bar with the bottle and topped up Rory's glass without being asked . He put the bottle down and leaned his elbows on the wood, an inch short of comfortable , and looked at the receipt on the bar .
"That one knew you before," he said.
"Everyone knew me before."
"Mm." He took the bottle away and put it back on the shelf, in its place, the label facing out, the way he kept everything. Then he picked up the cloth again and went back to a glass that was already dry.