AI The green neon over the door had been buzzing all week, a stuttering insect whine that Silas swore he'd fix and never did. Rory heard it before she saw the sign, the sound threading through the drizzle as she chained her bike to the railing. Her thighs ached. Her jacket smelled of chilli oil and wet cardboard, the ghost of eleven deliveries for the Golden Empress, the last to a man in Fitzrovia who had tipped her in coins and complained that his dumplings had gone soft in the rain.
She could have gone straight up the side stairs to her flat. Instead she pushed through the front door of the Nest, because some nights the silence upstairs was too large, and because Silas usually left a glass of something amber at the end of the bar for her without being asked .
The room was warm and low-lit. The old maps on the walls had yellowed behind their glass, borders drawn for countries that no longer existed, and the black-and-white photographs watched from their frames: dockworkers, a woman on a bicycle, a man in a trench coat whose face Rory had long suspected was a younger Silas. Tuesday crowd. A pair of students in the corner booth, two regulars at the dartboard, and a knot of people in suits near the window, laughing too loudly, lanyards still round their necks.
She was halfway to her stool when one of the suits said, "Aurora?"
Nobody called her that. Her mother did, when she was angry . Her father did in letters he never sent, the ones she imagined him drafting at his desk in Cardiff with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair. Rory turned before she could decide not to.
The woman had separated herself from the group. Tailored navy jacket, a silk scarf knotted at her throat, hair cut in a sleek bob that had cost more than Rory made in a week. It took a moment to find the girl inside her: the gap between her front teeth, the way she stood with her weight on one hip.
"Cerys," Rory said.
"Oh my God." Cerys laughed, a hand flying to her mouth. "Oh my God, it *is * you. I thought I was going mad. I saw you come in and I thought, no, that's not her, she's too—" She stopped.
"Too what?"
"I don't know." Cerys's smile wobbled, then steadied . "Quiet, I suppose. You walked in like you were counting the exits."
Rory had been. She always did now. Door, back corridor, the fire exit behind the kitchen, the bookshelf at the rear that wasn't really a bookshelf. It was a habit she'd picked up so gradually she no longer noticed it, and it unsettled her that someone else had.
"Long day," she said.
Behind the bar, Silas set down the glass he was polishing . His hazel eyes moved from Rory to Cerys and back, unhurried, taking inventory. He said nothing. He poured a whisky, slid it to the end of the bar, and turned his attention to the dartboard with the kind of deliberate disinterest that meant he was listening to every word.
"Can I—" Cerys glanced back at her colleagues, who were pulling on coats. "They're heading on to some awful club. I'd rather not. Can I sit?"
Rory looked at the stool beside her own. She thought about saying she was tired, which was true, or that she had an early shift, which was not. "Go on, then."
Cerys waved her friends off and perched on the stool as if it might be dirty. Then she seemed to catch herself doing it and sat properly, elbows on the bar, and for a second she was sixteen again, leaning across a table in the sixth-form common room to steal Rory's crisps.
"What are you doing in London?" Rory asked.
"Conference. Commercial litigation. It's exactly as thrilling as it sounds." Cerys turned her wine glass by the stem. "I'm with Harcourt Chambers now. In Cardiff."
Rory knew the name. Everyone in her father's world knew the name. "That's brilliant, Cer. Really."
"Your dad was on the other side of a case of mine last spring. He took me apart." Cerys smiled into her glass. "He was lovely about it afterwards. Bought me a coffee. He asked if I'd heard from you."
The whisky burned going down. Rory let it.
"I told him I hadn't," Cerys said. "Because I hadn't. For three years, Rory."
"I know."
"You just stopped. Like a tap." Her voice wasn't angry, which was worse. It was careful, the voice of someone who had rehearsed this in the shower and in traffic and at two in the morning and had worn all the edges off it. "I sent you a card on your birthday. Two birthdays. I rang your mum, and she said you were in London, that you were fine, and she said it the way people say it when they don't believe it."
Rory looked down at her hands on the bar. Chapped knuckles. A grease mark from the bike chain. On the inside of her left wrist, the little crescent scar, pale and shiny, from the summer she was nine and had gone over the handlebars on Cerys's brother's BMX. Cerys had held her hand in the back of the car all the way to the Heath, singing the Welsh national anthem badly to distract her, both of them hysterical by the time they reached A&E.
"Do you remember—" Rory started.
"The bike." Cerys had followed her gaze. "God. Rhodri still says it was your fault."
"It was my fault."
"It was absolutely your fault." They both laughed, and it was too loud and ended too quickly , and then the silence came back and sat between them like a third person.
Across the room, a dart thudded into the board. Someone groaned.
"Was it him?" Cerys asked quietly. "Evan?"
Rory didn't answer, and that was answer enough.
"I knew," Cerys said. "I think I knew. That Christmas, at your parents'. You flinched when he put his hand on your back. Just a bit. And I thought, that's odd, and then I told myself I was imagining it, because you were Aurora Carter, you were the cleverest person I'd ever met, you argued with lecturers for fun. You didn't *flinch *." Her mouth twisted . "I should have said something."
"You couldn't have—"
"I should have said something," Cerys repeated, and her eyes were bright . "I've been a barrister for four years. I stand up in court and say things for a living. And I couldn't say one sentence to my best friend."
Rory turned her glass in a slow circle on the wood. She wanted to tell Cerys it wouldn't have mattered. That she'd have defended him, the way she'd defended him to Eva, to herself, to the bathroom mirror. That it had taken Eva turning up at the door with a hire car and a suitcase already packed before she could make herself leave. But the words sat heavy and wouldn't come, because saying them out loud meant admitting how far she had fallen, and she didn't know how to do that in front of someone wearing a silk scarf.
"I'm not angry with you," Rory said at last. "I wasn't avoiding you because I was angry ."
"Then why?"
Because you were the life I was supposed to have, she thought. Because every time I pictured ringing you, I pictured you asking what I did now, and I pictured saying *I deliver takeaway on a secondhand bike *, and I pictured your face trying not to change.
"Because I didn't know who I was anymore," she said. "And you knew exactly who I used to be."
Cerys was quiet for a long moment. "And who are you now?"
Rory glanced at Silas. He was pretending to read a delivery invoice, his signet ring glinting as he turned the page. He had asked her the same question once, the first week she'd lived upstairs, and she hadn't had an answer then either. He'd only nodded, as if that were the correct reply.
"I'm working on it," she said.
Cerys reached into her jacket and took out a card, cream-coloured, embossed. She laid it on the bar between them and didn't push it any closer.
"My mobile's on the back. Same number as always, actually. I never changed it." She gave a small, embarrassed laugh. "In case."
Rory looked at the card. She thought of Cerys, three years of birthdays, keeping the same number the way people leave a porch light on.
"You've changed too, you know," Rory said. "You used to be terrified of ringing people."
"I still am. I just do it anyway now." Cerys finished her wine and stood, smoothing her jacket. She hesitated, then leaned in and hugged Rory, quick and fierce, the way she used to at the school gates. She smelled of expensive perfume and, underneath it, faintly, of the same coconut shampoo she'd used at sixteen.
"Your hair's shorter," Cerys said against her shoulder.
"Easier to manage."
"It suits you." She pulled back. "You look older, Rory. Not in a bad way. Just — like you've been somewhere."
Then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her, the neon sign buzzing its broken song into the rain.
Rory sat very still. After a while, Silas limped down the length of the bar, favouring his left leg the way he always did late in the evening, and refilled her glass without a word. His eyes went to the card, then to her face.
"Old friend?" he asked.
"From before ."
He nodded slowly , as though *before * were a country he knew well, one whose borders had long since been redrawn . "The ones from before ," he said, "are the hardest to look at. They remember the version of you that didn't have to learn how to watch the door."
Rory picked up the card. The embossed letters were cool beneath her thumb. She turned it over, looked at the number she had once known by heart, and felt it come back to her whole, every digit, as if it had only been waiting.
She slid it into her jacket pocket, next to the crumpled delivery receipts, and finished her drink.