AI The rain had driven half of Soho indoors, and most of it seemed to have washed up at the Nest. Rory came down the back stairs at half nine with her hair still damp from the shower, meaning to steal a bowl of the chips Silas pretended not to make for her, and stopped on the bottom step because someone at the bar was laughing .
It was a particular laugh. It started high and fell away in stages, like something tumbling down a flight of stairs, and Rory had last heard it in a kitchen in Pontcanna six years ago, over a bottle of supermarket prosecco and a sash window that wouldn't close.
Nia Pritchard sat on the third stool from the end, under the photograph of the Berlin checkpoint. She wore a charcoal coat with the collar still turned up, and her hair, which had once been a riot of dyed plum, was brown now and pinned back in a way that meant money. A leather document case leaned against her ankle. She was laughing at something Silas had said, and Silas, drying a glass with the slow patience of a man who had nowhere better to be, glanced past her shoulder and found Rory on the stairs.
His eyes held hers for a moment. Hazel, unhurried. A question.
Rory could have gone back up. She knew it with perfect clarity, the way she knew the number of steps to her door and which one creaked. Twelve steps. Third from the top. Nia would never have known.
She came down.
"Rory?"
Nia's stool scraped. Her face did several things at once, surprise, then delight, then something more careful underneath the delight, like a hand closing over a pocket.
"Oh my God. Rory Carter. I thought you were in... I don't know where I thought you were. Nobody knew." She half-rose, then stopped, as though uncertain whether a hug was still on offer. "Your hair."
"It grows back," Rory said. "Hi, Nia."
They hugged anyway. Nia smelled of expensive rain and the Tube, and underneath it, impossibly, of the same vanilla body spray she'd worn at sixteen. Rory counted three seconds and let go.
Silas set a glass of the house red in front of the empty stool beside Nia without being asked , then moved down the bar to see to a pair of students arguing over the jukebox. His limp was worse in the wet. He didn't look back, which was its own kind of looking.
"You know him?" Nia asked, lowering her voice. "The barman?"
"I live upstairs."
"Upstairs." Nia said it the way you'd repeat a word in a foreign language. She glanced around at the old maps yellowing behind their frames, the black-and-white faces of people long dead or long retired, the green of the neon sign bleeding through the front window onto the wet pavement. "It's very ... atmospheric."
"It's cheap," Rory said, which was not true, and sat.
For a minute they did the easy part. Nia was in London for a hearing at the Royal Courts, a commercial dispute, dull as ditchwater, she said, but the solicitors were paying for the hotel. She'd come in because the sign looked like something out of a film and she'd had a day. She was at chambers on Park Place now . She'd been called three years ago.
"Park Place," Rory said.
Nia's thumb found the stem of her glass and turned it. "Yes."
"Which set?"
A pause, small enough that anyone else would have missed it. "Thirty Park Place."
Her father's chambers. Brendan Carter's name would be on the board by the door in white paint, fourth from the top, where it had been since before Rory could read. She pictured Nia walking past it every morning with her coffee. Nodding to him in the clerks' room. Being asked, perhaps, over some Christmas drinks, whether she ever heard from his daughter.
"He's well," Nia said, answering the question Rory hadn't asked. "Your dad. He took silk last spring. He's... he talks about you."
"Does he."
"Not a lot. But he does."
Rory drank. The wine was the good bottle, not the house, and she understood that Silas had decided something about this conversation before she had.
"You look different," Nia said.
"You said. The hair."
"Not the hair." Nia studied her with the frank, measuring gaze Rory remembered from moots in second year, the look she gave a witness before she took them apart. It had been terrifying then, and funny, because Nia had used it on bus drivers and boys in clubs and once, memorably, on a swan. "You used to fill a room. You'd walk into the union and you'd be talking before the door shut behind you. You'd have an opinion about the music. You'd have an opinion about my shoes."
"Your shoes were terrible."
"My shoes were ironic." A smile, quick and real. Then it faded. "You're sitting with your back to the wall."
Rory looked down. She was. She'd taken the stool that let her see the door, the stairs, and the long mirror behind the optics, and she had done it without thinking, the way she did everything now .
"Habit," she said.
"Since when?"
Rory didn't answer. On the jukebox, the students had settled on something old and soulful, a woman singing about a train. Silas polished the same glass he'd been polishing for five minutes.
Nia reached across and, before Rory could move, turned her left hand over on the bar. The crescent scar sat pale against the inside of her wrist, a fingernail of old white tissue.
"Nan's gate," Nia said softly . "You were nine. You said you could climb it faster than me and you caught your wrist on the latch coming down, and there was blood all over my Nan's hydrangeas, and you didn't cry. You just stood there going, *I still won, though.*"
"I did still win."
"You did." Nia's thumb rested near the scar, not touching it. "I held a tea towel on it the whole way to the Heath. You told the nurse you'd been fighting pirates."
Rory let her hand stay where it was. It felt like a long time since anyone had held any part of her without her deciding it first.
"Why did you go, Rory?"
There it was. Rory had imagined this question in a hundred versions over six years, on night buses and in the back of the Golden Empress kitchen with a bag of prawn crackers cooling in her hands, and in every version she'd had an answer ready. She found now that she had none of them.
"You know why," she said.
Nia's jaw tightened. She took her hand back and wrapped it around her own glass.
"I didn't," she said. "Not for certain. Not then."
"Nia."
"I didn't *know *." Her voice cracked on the last word and she caught it, flattened it, the way barristers were trained to. "You'd stopped coming out. You stopped answering. When you did come, he was always there, and he was so, God, he was so nice, Rory, he bought rounds, he remembered my birthday. And you'd sit there and you'd laugh at the right times and I thought, fine, she's in love, people get boring when they're in love."
"That's what he wanted you to think."
"I know that *now *." Nia pressed the heel of her hand under one eye, briskly, as if brushing off a crumb . "That summer. The barbecue at Gareth's. You wore that long-sleeved thing and it was thirty degrees, and I said, I actually said, *aren't you roasting in that *, and you looked at me. You just looked at me. And I went and got another burger."
Rory remembered the burger. She remembered the charcoal smoke and Evan's hand resting on the back of her neck, light, companionable, and how she had calculated exactly how much to say to Nia in the thirty seconds he'd be at the grill, and how she had said nothing, because Nia had turned away first.
"You didn't do anything wrong," Rory said.
"Don't." Nia shook her head. "Don't give me the nice version. I've been rehearsing this for six years. I owe you a closing speech at least."
Despite everything, Rory laughed. It came out rusty.
"Eva told me, after," Nia said. "Not where you were. Just that you were safe and that I shouldn't look. So I didn't look. I told myself that was respecting your wishes." She turned her glass another quarter. "It was easier, though. That's the truth. It was easier not to look."
The woman on the jukebox had reached the part where the train pulled out. Rory watched Silas in the mirror. He'd moved to the far end, near the bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf, and he was pretending to check the stock. His signet ring caught the light when he set a bottle down.
"I'm not who you remember," Rory said at last. "I'm not sure that person's coming back. I deliver noodles on a moped. I sleep with the light on some nights. I've got a friend who owns a bar and knows things about people he shouldn't, and I'm learning to know them too." She hadn't meant to say that last part. She let it stand. "I'm not sorry I left. I'm sorry about how. I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye to you. You were the one I should have said it to."
Nia was quiet for a long moment.
"He's engaged," she said. "Evan. I thought you should hear it from someone who'd say it like it's a warning and not gossip."
Rory felt it land somewhere under her ribs, cold and small. She nodded once.
"Right," she said. "Thank you."
Nia opened her document case, took out a card, and wrote something on the back. She slid it across the bar the way you'd slide a piece to someone in a game of chess, carefully , without letting go too soon.
"My mobile. It's the same one. It's always been the same one." She stood and buttoned her coat. "I'm not asking you to ring. I just wanted you to know it's the same."
Rory looked at the card. Nia's handwriting hadn't changed either: the fat looping sevens, the little circle she still drew over her i's, as if she were twelve and passing notes behind a textbook.
"Nia."
Nia turned at the door, one hand on the brass. Green light washed across her face.
"You did win, you know ," Rory said. "At the gate."
Something broke open in Nia's expression, and then she was gone , into the rain, and the door swung shut behind her with a soft pneumatic sigh.
Silas came back down the bar. He didn't say anything. He took the empty glass from in front of Nia's stool and set a bowl of chips at Rory's elbow, salted the way she liked them, and went back to the glass he'd been drying.
Rory sat with her back to the wall and turned the card over and over in her fingers until the corners went soft.