Run: 2026-09-23-01M37NXSB8904HSYJP5XP3NRWR

The green neon above the door had developed a stutter. It buzzed, died and caught again, painting the wet pavement of Frith Street the colour of pond water, then leaving it black. Rory stood under it for a moment with her helmet hooked on two fingers and the Golden Empress thermal bag still strapped to her back, smelling of star anise and scorched sesame oil. Eleven deliveries. One man in Fitzrovia who'd opened the door in a towel and tipped her a single fifty-pence coin, warm from somewhere she didn't want to think about. Inside, the Nest ran at its Thursday murmur. Silas stood behind the bar polishing a tumbler he'd already polished, his weight tipped onto the right leg the way it always was by this hour. He clocked her over the rim of the glass and tilted his head a quarter-inch toward the far end of the counter. Rory followed the tilt. A woman sat beneath the framed photograph of the Thames frozen in 1963, a gin and tonic in front of her that hadn't lost any of its ice. Charcoal suit. Hair scraped into a knot so tight it looked structural. A lanyard poked out of her handbag, the blue ribbon printed with the Law Society crest. It took Rory three seconds to recognise her. It took the woman one. "Rory Carter." The name came out flat, like a verdict. "Bloody hell." "Nia." Nia Pritchard slid off the stool and stopped halfway, as if the floor between them had turned to ice she didn't trust. The girl Rory remembered had worn Doc Martens with the laces missing and dyed her fringe the purple of a bruised plum. She had once been sick into a pint glass at the Welsh Club and then drunk from a different one without breaking conversation. This woman wore court shoes. She had a wedding band, thin and gold, and she turned it with her thumb while she looked Rory up and down. "You cut your hair." "Four years ago." "It suits you." Nia's gaze snagged on the delivery bag. "Are you... working?" "Just finished." Rory unbuckled the straps and let the bag thud onto the nearest stool. "Chinese place round the corner. I do nights." "Right. Right, no, that's great." It wasn't great. Rory watched Nia's face try to arrange itself around the fact and fail, the way a hand fails to fold a map back along its original creases. Silas set a glass of Guinness in front of Rory without being asked, the head still settling into its cream collar. He didn't linger, only moved off to wipe down the taps at the other end, but Rory noticed he'd chosen the taps within earshot. "What are you doing in Soho?" Rory wrapped her hands round the pint. "Didn't think you'd come east of Newport if someone paid you." "Someone did pay me. Conference at Chancery Lane. Regulatory compliance in cross-border disputes." Nia pulled a face that almost belonged to the old Nia. "Three days of men called Rupert explaining things I already know. A colleague said this place did a decent gin and nobody from the conference would find it." "Colleague." "From chambers." Nia sipped, set the glass down, lined it up with the edge of the beer mat. "Your dad's chambers, actually. I took pupillage there. Tenancy last spring." The Guinness went cold in Rory's mouth. "Did you." "He never told you?" "We don't talk much." "He talks about you." Nia said it fast, the way people rip off plasters. "Not a lot. But he's got that photo of you on his desk still. The graduation one, where you're squinting." "I didn't graduate." "The matriculation one, then. I don't know. You're wearing a gown and you look like you want to kill the photographer." "I did want to kill the photographer. It was Dad." Nia laughed, and for half a second the laugh was the one from sixth form, too loud, a honk she used to hate. Then she heard herself and swallowed it. On the jukebox, someone had put on an old Nina Simone track. The bar's low lamps made the maps on the walls look stained with tea, whole continents browning at the edges. Rory traced the rim of her glass and counted the years. Seven since Cardiff. Nine since she and Nia had shared a damp flat on Cathays Terrace with a boiler they'd named Gareth because it only worked when you shouted at it. "You just went." Nia wasn't looking at her now. She was looking at the frozen Thames in the photograph, the tiny black figures skating on it. "One week you were there, the next your room was empty. You left your duvet. I kept it for a year. Thought you'd want it back." "I didn't need a duvet." "That's not the point, Rory." "I know it's not." "Your mum rang me. Did you know that? She rang me crying, asking if I knew where you'd gone, and I had to say no, because I didn't. I'd lived with you for two years and I didn't have a clue." The thumb worked the wedding ring round again. Round and round. "Eva knew. Eva bloody Morgan, who you hadn't spoken to since Year Nine, and she knew." "Eva had a sofa in Walthamstow." "I had a sofa." "You had a sofa in Cardiff." The word sat between them. Nia's jaw tightened, and Rory watched her understand it the way you watch someone read a letter over their own shoulder, slowly, one line behind. "Evan still comes round the Pen and Wig," Nia said finally. "Most Fridays. He's with someone now. Sophie, she's in-house at the Principality." Rory's left hand found her right wrist, and her thumb settled on the crescent of scar tissue there, pale as a nail clipping. An old habit. She'd had it since she was seven and fell through a greenhouse pane, but she'd only started touching it in the last year with Evan. "Good for Sophie." "He told people you'd had a breakdown." Nia's voice had dropped. "After you left. Said you'd been struggling for months, that your dad had pushed you too hard with the law thing, that you'd cracked. He was very... sad about it. People bought him drinks." "Did you buy him a drink?" Nia didn't answer. She picked up the gin, looked at it, put it down again without drinking. "I saw your arm once," she said. "Christmas, second year. You were reaching for the gravy and your sleeve went up. You said you'd caught it on the car door." "I remember." "There isn't a car door in the world that does that, Rory. I knew that. I knew it when I was holding the gravy boat." Her mouth twisted. "And I said, 'You want to be more careful,' and I passed you the sprouts." Silas had stopped pretending to wipe the taps. He had set down the cloth and was standing with both hands flat on the counter, the silver signet ring catching the lamplight, his face turned toward the window as if the rain were the most interesting thing he'd seen all week. Rory drank. The Guinness tasted of iron and burnt bread. "You were twenty," she said. "So were you." "Yeah. And I told you it was a car door. What were you meant to do, call the police on a car?" "Something." Nia's voice cracked straight down the middle. "I could have done something. Instead I made partner-track in your father's chambers and I sit in the same bar as your ex on Fridays and I laugh when he does the impression of Judge Hollis. He does a really good Judge Hollis." "He does," Rory said. "He did it at my birthday." They both almost smiled. Neither of them managed it. Outside, the neon caught again, and a stripe of green slid across the bar top and over Nia's hands. Rory noticed her nails, short and plain, no varnish. The old Nia had painted them a different colour every Sunday and chipped them to nothing by Wednesday. "You look different," Nia said. "Not the hair. You look... I don't know. Like you're watching the door." "It's a bar. Someone has to." "That's not what I mean." "I know what you mean." Rory turned the pint glass a slow quarter-circle on its mat. "I deliver noodles. I live upstairs. I've got a boss who calls me 'little sparrow' and feeds me dumplings when I look thin, and a landlord who pretends he's not listening to this whole conversation." "I'm not," Silas said to the window. "He is." Nia looked at him, then at Rory, and something in her shoulders let go an inch. She pulled the lanyard out of her bag and wound the blue ribbon round her fingers until the tips went white. "I've got a train at nine tomorrow," she said. "Then a hearing on Monday. Then your dad's retirement do in June. He's going. Did you know that? Finally." "No." "I'm organising it." Nia unwound the ribbon. Wound it again. "There's a list. For invitations." Rory looked at the Guinness, at the last brown inch of it clinging to the glass, and didn't say anything at all.