Run: 2026-09-23-01M36WD45HC46CKFHN7VDS17K9

Rory had three delivery receipts fanned across the zinc bar top and was adding the numbers in her head when the door opened and a woman in a cream trench coat stepped in, shaking rain from her sleeves as though the water had personally offended her. Silas looked up from the glass he was polishing, then looked at Rory, then back at the woman. He set the glass upside down on the cloth and moved to the far end of the bar to rearrange bottles that did not need rearranging. His left leg dragged the faintest scuff across the floorboards. The green neon over the entrance buzzed behind the newcomer and turned her blonde hair the colour of pond weed. "Table for one? Or are you meeting—" The woman turned. Her eyes found Rory and stayed there. Rory's pen stopped. "Bethan." The name came out flat. She had not said it in four years and the shape of it felt wrong in her mouth, too much Wales in the vowels for a room that smelled of London lager and old maps. "Aurora bloody Carter." Bethan Vaughan crossed the distance in four strides, heels striking the boards like a metronome. She stopped an arm's length away and did not hug her. She looked at Rory the way people look at a house they used to live in. "God. Look at you." "What's left of me." Rory slid the receipts into her apron. "You're a long way from Cathays." "I'm a long way from a lot of things." She had. The girl who'd argued with Professor Hargreaves about the ethics of plea bargaining while wearing a jumper with a hole in the elbow was gone. In her place stood someone with a jaw-length blowout and a wedding band so thin it disappeared against her finger. The trench coat had a proper belt. Her nails were the colour of oyster shells. Even the way she stood had changed — squared up, planted, as if she'd spent four years learning exactly how much space she was entitled to take. "Sit down." Rory pulled out the stool beside her and gestured at Silas. "Silas, this is Bethan. We did Pre-Law together. Bethan, Silas owns the place." "Charmed." Bethan put her handbag on the bar — leather, structured, nothing like the canvas tote she'd carried through the rain in Cardiff with its library books swelling like bread dough. Silas limped back over and poured a measure of gin without asking what she wanted. He set it down in front of her, the silver ring on his right hand catching the light, and retreated again to the safe distance of the glassware. "You work here." Bethan said it as observation, not question. Her eyes tracked the apron, the pen behind Rory's ear, the receipts. "Deliveries, mostly. For the Chinese up the road. I use the bar as a base." "Deliveries." "Don't start." "I'm not starting anything." Bethan wrapped both hands around the gin and pressed her thumbs into the condensation. "I just — the last I heard, you'd been offered the internship at Irwin Mitchell. Mum ran into your mum at the Roath market and she said you'd come to London to, and I quote, 'sort your head out.'" "Jennifer has a flair for understatement." "She's not wrong though. Is she?" Rory picked up her pen and drew a line through nothing on the back of a receipt. Across the room, above the bar, a black-and-white photograph showed a man in a fedora standing outside a building in what looked like Prague. She had looked at that photograph a hundred times and never once asked Silas about it. "Where are you living?" Rory asked. "Chiswick. Daniel's firm did the move. He's at Freshfields." "Daniel." "My husband. Two years in June." Bethan turned her hand so the band caught the neon. She held it there a beat longer than vanity required. "You never came to the wedding." "I never got an invitation. The one to the engagement party got forwarded from three addresses." Silence settled between them like sediment. Bethan sipped the gin and made a face at it. "You always wanted this," Rory said. "Not the gin. The rest." "You always wanted it too. That's the thing I can't make sense of." Bethan set the glass down and pushed it an inch away. "You were better than me. You knew the coursework before the lectures. Hargreaves used your essay on the Theft Act as an example, do you remember? He read it out and Seamus Doherty stood up and slow-clapped and everyone lost it." "I remember." "And then you stopped coming in." Rory's thumb found the crescent scar on her left wrist and pressed. "Things happened." "Evan." The name sat on the bar between them, ugly as a dropped coin. "Evan happened," Rory said. "And other things happened. And then I was here." Bethan looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind her face — not pity, something worse. Recognition. She picked the gin back up. "I should've called." "You did call. Twice. In the first month." "After that." "After that I'd changed the number again and you were sitting your finals and I was eating toast in Eva's spare room and sleeping fourteen hours a day. There was nothing to say." Rory tapped the pen against the zinc. "You passed." "Upper second. Could've been a first if I'd pulled myself together in the third year. I got the training contract anyway." A muscle in Bethan's jaw twitched. "I'm at Whitmore and Pierce now. Commercial. Sixty-hour weeks and a pension scheme my father approves of." "He would've approved of me, back then. On paper." "He asked about you. Every Christmas, for three years. 'How's the Carter girl with the essays.'" Bethan dropped her voice into a rumble so unlike her father's careful baritone that Rory almost laughed. Almost. "Last Christmas he stopped asking." "That's the weight of time for you. People stop asking." "You could've told me." "Told you what?" Rory kept her voice level. "That I'd flunked the second year because I couldn't sit in a lecture hall without checking my phone every ninety seconds? That I left half my things in a flat in Cathays because packing took too long and he might come back? That your friend from the library, the one who used to steal sachets of ketchup from Spar because she thought it was funny, is now thirty and carries noodles to strangers in the rain?" Bethan flinched. Just the once. She covered it by reaching for the glass again and this time she drained it. "You don't get to do that," Bethan said. "Do what." "Talk about yourself like you're a cautionary tale so I can't be angry with you for disappearing." She pushed the empty glass toward the centre of the bar. "I sat outside your door in Cathays for forty minutes the night before my tort exam because nobody had heard from you in nine days. Eva finally came down and told me you'd gone to your aunt's and I said which aunt and she wouldn't answer me. I failed that exam by four marks." "You passed it in the resit." "Because I re-sat it while I was also burying my grandmother." Bethan's voice stayed even, but her knuckles had gone white around the base of the glass. "So don't tell me about weight." Rory said nothing. The fridge behind the bar hummed. Somewhere past the bookshelf at the back — the one with the brass handle and the third shelf that never held anything heavier than pamphlets — a clock ticked that she'd never been able to locate. "You're right," Rory said. "I'm sorry." "I don't want sorry. I want—" Bethan stopped. She looked at the maps on the wall, the photographs of cities and bridges and men in hats she'd never know. "I want to know which part of you left." "Left when?" "In Cardiff. At the end." Bethan turned back and her eyes were bright and furious. "Because I've thought about it for four years and I cannot work out which part of you I lost and which part of you left on purpose." Rory opened her mouth. The door of the Nest swung inward and two men in wet coats came through arguing about a football match, and the noise of the street came with them, horns and shouting and a bus pulling away. Silas moved down the bar to serve them, his limp more pronounced than usual in the hour before closing. The neon sign above the door flickered once and steadied. Rory looked at Bethan's hands. The oyster-shell nails. The thin band. The knuckles that had once barked open on the edge of a coffee table in Cathays because she'd hit it while laughing too hard at one of Rory's impressions of Hargreaves. "The part that did essays," Rory said. "That's the part that went." "And the part that stayed?" "Carries noodles."