Run: 2026-09-23-01M37J38MQYTD5SEANC567RMMS

Aurora came down to the bar with a paper bag from the Golden Empress hooked over her wrist. The handles had cut a pink line across the small crescent scar there. She lifted the bag onto the counter, pushed two cartons towards Silas and kept the third. “Yu-Fei sent enough for a wedding.” Silas looked inside. “Does she know about the wedding?” “She’d have charged more.” He took a fork from beneath the counter. Rain struck the front window in narrow, crooked lines, breaking the green light of the Raven’s Nest sign across the glass. Aurora had just opened her carton when the woman at the far end of the bar turned on her stool. “Rory Carter.” Aurora knew the voice before she placed the face. It had once filled the back row of a lecture theatre in Cardiff, demanding an answer from a visiting barrister who had planned to take no questions. “Nia?” Nia Hughes stood. Her hair, once long and dark enough to leave on every sofa she visited, stopped an inch above her ears. She wore a charcoal suit with a torn lining at one cuff and held a glass of water between both hands. Aurora remembered her with a rucksack full of loose papers, red ink on her fingers, and a coat she refused to replace because its pockets held everything. “I walked past that sign three times,” Nia told her. “I kept thinking I’d been in here before. Then you came through the door.” “You haven’t been in here before.” “There you go. Mystery solved.” They hugged. Nia’s glass pressed cold against Aurora’s back. When they parted, Aurora saw Nia look at her wrist, then at the carton. “You still eat standing up.” “I live upstairs.” “That’s worse.” Silas set a clean fork beside Aurora’s carton. His silver ring clicked against the counter. “Friend of yours?” “From Cardiff. Nia, this is Silas. Silas, Nia.” “I’ve heard your name,” Silas told Nia. “Once or twice.” Nia raised her eyebrows at Aurora. “Good once or twice?” “He has a poor memory.” Silas took the bag of food to the other end of the bar. Aurora pulled out the stool beside Nia and sat. On the wall behind them, an old map of London showed streets cut through by later roads. Nia turned her glass until a wet circle formed beneath it. “I thought you’d gone back to Cardiff,” Nia told her. “Why?” “Your father. The course. You left a lot of things there.” “I stayed in London.” “I can see that.” Aurora broke apart her noodles with the fork. Nia watched her for a moment, then took a folded document from her jacket and tucked it beneath her glass. Its top edge bore a company logo Aurora recognised from the hoardings around a building site near the restaurant. “You work for Bellwether?” Nia glanced at the paper. “Since last year.” “They’ve been putting up flats round the corner. One of our delivery drivers got a notice from them.” “They bought his building?” “They bought his landlord.” Nia ran a thumb over the rim of the glass. “I’m in the legal team.” “At Bellwether.” “Yes.” Aurora found a strip of cabbage and laid it across the lid. In their second year, Nia had spent three cold afternoons outside a council office protesting the sale of student rooms to a private company. She had made Aurora hold one end of a banner while the wind drove rain through its cardboard letters. Afterwards they had dried their socks on Nia’s radiator and argued over whether the banner should have named the company’s directors. “You used to have a list of landlords you wanted prosecuted.” “I still have it.” “How many do you work for?” “Three, if you count the subsidiaries.” Nia took a drink. Aurora looked at her cuff again, at the small tear in the lining. It caught on the edge of the document when Nia pushed it farther under the glass. “I didn’t know you’d moved to London,” Aurora told her. “I sent you my address when I did.” “Where?” “Email. The old university one. Then the Gmail you used for everything else.” Nia bent the corner of a beer mat, flattened it and bent it again. “You never answered.” “I stopped reading it.” “I gathered that. After a while.” At the far end, Silas turned the volume down on the radio. A trumpet receded into the clink of glasses from a table by the door. “I should have called you,” Aurora told her. “You could have.” Nia left the beer mat alone. Aurora ate a mouthful of noodles she couldn’t taste. Across the bar, a black-and-white photograph showed three men outside a theatre that no longer stood. She had dusted that frame last week and found a layer of soot along its top edge. “Evan had your number,” Nia told her. “I asked him to give you mine when I changed it.” Aurora set down her fork. “He told me you’d lost your phone.” “I did. For two days.” “This was after you missed exams.” “I know when it was.” Nia lifted her hands from the bar. “All right.” Silas came past with a tray of empty glasses. Aurora shifted her knees to let him through. His bad leg made him turn sideways in the narrow space, but he kept the tray level. Once he’d gone, Nia picked up the beer mat and read the brewery’s name as though she had never seen one. “I went to your flat,” she told Aurora. “He opened the door.” Aurora looked at her. “He told me you were asleep. It was four in the afternoon. I knew you’d been missing seminars, and I let him send me away.” “I wasn’t asleep.” Nia held the beer mat by its bent edge. “I know.” For a while the two women listened to the rain. A couple came in, shook out an umbrella and took the table beneath the photograph. Aurora remembered the flat in Cardiff: a saucepan with a loose handle, a bedroom window painted shut, Evan’s shoes placed straight across the front door after an argument. Nia had stood on that doorstep. Aurora could picture the patch of peeling paint beside the bell, but not the day itself. “I got your messages later,” Aurora told her. “Eva helped me set up a new account. The old ones came through all at once.” “I wrote some stupid things.” “You asked whether I wanted you to collect my books.” “That wasn’t one of the stupid ones.” “You wrote that I could have them sent to your place. You said you’d pay.” Nia drew her glass off the damp paper. “Did you want them?” “At the time? I couldn’t decide which shoes to pack.” Aurora picked up her fork, then put it down. Nia’s mouth tightened, not in surprise. She had read those messages again, Aurora thought; she knew what order they had come in. Silas arrived with a fresh glass of water and placed it beside Nia’s hand. “Kitchen’s closed,” he told them, nodding at the cartons. “But I have crisps.” “We’re all right,” Aurora told him. He moved off towards the couple with the umbrella. Nia watched him go. “Is he your landlord?” “Yes. And my friend.” “You’ve got a place above a bar.” “It has a window that opens.” “That sounds pointed.” “It was meant to.” Nia gave a brief smile and looked down into the new glass. “I left Cardiff too. Six months after you. I told everyone I’d got the Bellwether job because I wanted to learn how they operated.” “And then?” “I learnt.” She turned towards Aurora. “There’s a woman in Walthamstow who wrote me a four-page letter about her mother’s stairlift. I know what the surveyor missed. I know what our letter to her can say without admitting we missed it. I wrote the letter we sent.” “What did it say?” “That we’d review the access arrangements.” “Will you?” “I’ve booked the surveyor to go back.” “And the letter?” “It went out yesterday.” Aurora pushed the cabbage back into her carton. Nia had once spent an hour arguing with a landlord over a broken heater in a house neither of them lived in. She’d put the call on speaker so Aurora could hear each excuse, then written down the name of every person he transferred her to. “You can go and see the woman,” Aurora told her. “I could.” Nia took the document from beneath her glass. Its damp corner clung to the bar for a moment before it came free. She folded it along an existing crease, careful not to tear the softened paper. “What happened to the course?” she asked. “I left.” “Your dad must have loved that.” “He posted me an application form the following autumn.” “For Cardiff?” “For three different places. He wrote the deadlines on a separate sheet.” “Did you apply?” “No.” Nia looked at the signet ring on Silas’s hand as he reached for a bottle behind the bar, then back at Aurora. “You were good at it.” “I was good at the reading.” “You were good at telling people when they’d changed the subject.” Aurora leaned on the counter. “I still do that.” “I remember.” Nia touched the tear in her cuff and pulled her hand away before it caught. “I’m glad you’re here, Rory. I’d rather have heard it from you years ago, but I’m glad I know now.” “I’m sorry I left you guessing.” Nia nodded. She drew the wet glass towards her and took a drink. Aurora picked up her fork. The noodles had begun to stick together, and she separated them against the side of the carton while Nia unfolded her document and found a dry place to set it.