AI The rain had followed Rory all the way from Gerrard Street, and by the time she pushed through the door beneath the green neon sign her jacket was heavy with it, the empty Golden Empress delivery bag folded under her arm like a wet newspaper. The Nest was busier than a Tuesday had any right to be. A cluster of suits had colonised the long table under the map of pre-war Vienna, their laughter too loud for the room, the kind that expected to be forgiven.
Silas caught her eye from behind the bar and tipped his head toward her usual stool at the end, the one half in shadow beside the photograph of a woman on a Lisbon tram. He was already reaching for the good whiskey, the silver signet ring clicking once against the glass.
"You look drowned," he said.
"I feel drowned." She hooked the bag over the back of the stool. "Fourteen deliveries. One man tipped me in euros."
"Generous of him."
"Two cents."
Silas's beard shifted in what passed, with him, for a grin. He slid the glass toward her and moved off down the bar, favouring his left leg the way he always did when the weather turned. Rory wrapped both hands around the whiskey without drinking and let the warmth climb her wrists.
"Rory?"
She knew the voice before she understood it. It arrived out of order, the way a smell from childhood does: first the feeling, then the place, then the name. Chalk dust and cut grass. A garden wall in Pontcanna. *Cerys.*
She turned.
Cerys Morgan stood two feet away in a charcoal suit that had been tailored by someone who knew what they were doing , her red hair pinned back in a knot so neat it looked structural. She held a glass of white wine by the stem. The girl Rory remembered had drunk cider from the can and worn her hair in a braid she chewed when she was thinking . This woman did not look like she chewed anything.
"It is you," Cerys said. "God. I thought I was seeing things."
"Hi." The word came out smaller than Rory meant it to. She cleared her throat. "Hi, Cerys."
For a moment neither of them moved. Then Cerys set her wine on the bar and leaned in, and the hug was brief and careful, all shoulder blades, the hug of two people who have both forgotten where their arms used to go.
"You're soaked," Cerys said, stepping back and brushing at her lapel.
"Occupational hazard."
Cerys's gaze dropped to the folded bag on the stool, the red-and-gold logo of the Empress bleeding slightly where the rain had got at it. Rory watched her read it. Watched her decide not to say anything, and then watched the not-saying take up space between them like a third person pulling up a chair.
"Sit," Rory said, because it was easier than letting her stand there. "If you want. Unless your lot need you."
Cerys glanced back at the suits under the Vienna map. One of them was doing an impression of a judge, jowls and all. "They'll survive. Somebody made silk this week. We're meant to be celebrating." She took the stool beside Rory's and it seemed to take her a second to arrange herself on it, as if stools were a thing she'd grown out of. "You didn't come to the reunion."
"I didn't know there was one."
"There was. Two years ago. At the Cameo." Cerys turned her glass a quarter turn on the bar. "Your name was on the list. They'd put a little question mark next to it."
"That sounds about right."
Down the bar, Silas was polishing a glass that did not need polishing. He had the angle of someone not listening, which Rory had long ago learned meant he was listening to everything.
"So you're in London," Cerys said.
"I'm in London."
"For how long?"
"A while." Rory finally drank. The whiskey went down like a struck match. "Three years, nearly."
Cerys absorbed this. Three years was not a small number. Three years was long enough to have sent a text, a Christmas card, a single line on a birthday. Rory could see her doing the arithmetic, and could see, too, the moment she arrived at the other number, the one underneath. *Three years since you left him.*
"Your dad asks about you," Cerys said.
Rory set the glass down.
"I'm in his chambers now. Did you know that? Pupillage, then tenancy. He took a chance on me." A small, rueful twist of the mouth. "I think he liked having someone around who'd known you when you were nine. He'll be in the clerks' room going through a brief and he'll just say, out of nowhere, *Has Aurora been in touch?* Like I'd have heard before he did."
"And what do you tell him?"
"The truth. That I haven't." Cerys looked at her. Really looked, for the first time, the way she used to across the kitchen table doing homework neither of them wanted to do. "What should I tell him?"
Rory didn't answer. Behind her, the suits erupted over something, a wave of laughter that broke against the photographs and ran off the walls.
"You've cut your hair," Cerys said, softer .
"Years ago."
"You used to hate it short. You said it made you look like a Lego person."
"I was twelve."
"You were twenty-two. You said it in second year, in the library, and the librarian shushed you and you told her she had a Lego haircut too." Cerys laughed, but it wobbled. "You got us both thrown out. I had a moot the next morning."
Rory remembered. That was the unbearable part. She remembered the fluorescent hum of the law library, the librarian's affronted face, Cerys dragging her down the stairs by the sleeve, both of them hiccuping with laughter in the rain on Park Place. She remembered being the kind of person who said things out loud without first measuring the room for exits. She could not remember, exactly, when she had stopped.
"I'm not really her anymore," she said.
"No." Cerys's eyes moved over her face as if checking a document against an original . "You're very quiet now."
"I was always quiet."
"You were *never * quiet. You were the loudest person I knew. You used to argue with your father at dinner for sport." A pause. "You haven't looked away from the door once since I sat down."
Rory's hand, resting on the bar, went still. She hadn't known she was doing it. Or she had, the way you know your own heartbeat, which is to say not at all until someone makes you listen.
Cerys reached out and, very lightly , touched the inside of Rory's left wrist, where the small crescent scar showed pale against the skin. Rory let her.
"Mr. Pritchard's wall," Cerys said. "You said you could walk the whole length without falling off."
"I nearly did."
"You got to the end. Then you fell." Her thumb rested beside the scar and did not quite touch it . "I held your wrist in my school jumper all the way to your mum's. You didn't cry. I cried. You told me to stop being soft."
"You were being soft."
"I was nine and there was blood everywhere." Cerys withdrew her hand and folded it with the other in her lap. When she spoke again it was to her wine. "I saw you once, you know. After. Before you left. At that Italian place on Wellfield Road. You were with him. You had a sleeve pulled down over your hand even though it was August, and when I waved you looked at him first. Before you waved back. You looked at him first."
The neon from the sign outside came through the front window in a long green bar and lay across the floor between the stools.
"I thought about it all the way home," Cerys said. "I thought, I'll ring her. I'll ring her tomorrow and I'll just ask. And then I had a hearing, and then I had another one, and then I told myself it wasn't my place, and then it was October." She drank, a small precise sip. "And then Eva told me you'd gone."
"Eva told you?"
"She rang me. She wanted to know if I'd heard from you. I think she wanted someone else to have known." Cerys smiled without any happiness in it. "I said no. I didn't say that I'd seen you. I didn't say that I'd known, in a way. I just said no."
Rory looked at her whiskey. There was a whole speech somewhere in her, a version of this conversation she had rehearsed on night buses and in the shower and at three in the morning staring at the ceiling of the flat upstairs, where she told Cerys it didn't matter, that nobody could have done anything, that she herself hadn't known what she knew until she was already packing . All of it true. None of it would come.
"I didn't call you either," she said instead . "Afterwards. I could have. I didn't want you to see."
"See what?"
"Me. Like that. I didn't want to be the person you had to be careful with."
Cerys was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "Well. Now I don't know how to be anything else."
It landed between them and stayed there, and neither of them tried to lift it.
At the Vienna table, somebody was calling Cerys's name. She looked over, raised a hand, *one minute *. Then she took a card from the inside pocket of her jacket, cream stock, embossed, the address of her father's chambers, Rory's father's chambers, printed in a font Rory had seen on letterhead her whole childhood. Cerys turned it over and wrote a mobile number on the back with a slim silver pen.
"You don't have to," she said, setting it by Rory's glass. "I just, I'd like it. If you did. Even just to tell me to stop being soft."
She slid off the stool. For a second she looked like she might hug her again, then seemed to think better of it and touched Rory's shoulder instead, once, and went back to the table where the laughter swallowed her.
Rory sat with the card. After a while Silas limped back down the bar and topped up her glass without being asked .
"Old friend?" he said.
"Old friend."
He glanced at the card, and then at her face, and then, with the tact of a man who had spent thirty years learning when not to ask a question, at the door she was once again watching.
"Keep it," he said. "You can always throw it away later. It's harder to do the other thing."
She turned the card over. Cerys's handwriting was the same as it had been at nine, looping and impatient, the sevens crossed the way their teacher had told them not to. Rory ran her thumb across the numbers, then across the crescent on her wrist, and for the first time in a long while she let herself look at something other than the door.