AI The rain had followed Rory all the way from Gerrard Street, and it followed her in through the door of the Nest, dripping off the hem of her jacket onto the floorboards. The jacket still smelled of the Golden Empress, of star anise and fryer oil and the plastic bags Yu-Fei insisted on double-knotting. Six deliveries in the last hour. A man in Fitzrovia had tipped her in coins and then tried to take one back.
Silas had a whisky waiting before she reached the bar. He didn't ask; he never asked. He only slid it across the wood with two fingers, the silver of his signet ring catching the low light, and went back to drying a glass that was already dry.
"Busy night?" he said.
"Stupid night."
"Those are the busy ones."
She took the stool at the end, the one with its back to the wall, where she could see the door and the long mirror behind the bottles and the corner where the old maps curled at their edges. Prague was up there somewhere, a faded street plan behind glass. She'd never asked Silas why he kept it. She'd learned there was a difference between not knowing and choosing not to know, and she'd grown fond of the second.
The door opened again at half ten. Rain noise, then laughter, then four people in good coats shaking themselves off like dogs. Lawyers, Rory thought, without deciding to think it. It was in the shoes, the careful kind of expensive, and in the way the tallest of them held the door for the others and talked over his shoulder about a judge. Two men, two women. One of the women was already looking at the photographs on the wall, head tipped, and something in the angle of her neck made Rory set down her glass.
Dark blonde hair, pinned up now instead of falling in the bird's nest it used to be. A navy coat that fit. The same small gap between her front teeth when she smiled at something the tall man said.
Bethan Morgan.
Rory looked down at the bar. Her heart did a thing she didn't approve of. In the mirror she watched Silas notice her noticing, watched his eyes flick to the group and back, and she gave the smallest shake of her head. He resumed drying the glass.
It might have been fine. The Nest was dim enough, the green of the sign outside bleeding through the front window and turning everyone's faces the colour of old pond water. Rory had cut her hair. She was wearing a delivery jacket in Soho at half ten on a Tuesday. Nobody from Cardiff University's Pre-Law cohort would be looking for her here, because nobody from Cardiff University's Pre-Law cohort would imagine her here.
Bethan came to the bar to order. She stood two stools down, reading the chalkboard, and said, "Could I get a bottle of the Rioja, please, and four—"
And stopped.
Rory didn't turn her head. She watched it happen in the mirror, the slow double-take, the way Bethan's mouth stayed open around the word she hadn't finished.
"Aurora?"
Nobody had called her that in two years except her mother, on the phone, when she was trying to make a point. It sounded strange in this room. It sounded like a name that belonged to someone Rory used to babysit.
"Hi, Beth."
"Oh my God." Bethan laughed, one short breath of it. "Oh my God. I thought you were—I don't know what I thought. Your hair."
"It was getting in the way."
"It was down to here." Bethan's hand floated near her own ribs, then dropped, as if she'd realised it was a strange thing to be measuring. "You look—"
She didn't finish that either. Rory let her not finish it.
Silas set the Rioja on the bar with four glasses and a corkscrew and withdrew to the far end without a word. Bethan glanced back at her friends, who had claimed a table under the photograph of the man with the umbrella on Westminster Bridge. The tall one raised his eyebrows. Bethan held up one finger: *a minute.*
"Can I?" She meant the stool between them.
Rory moved her helmet off it.
Bethan sat. Up close she smelled of rain and some perfume Rory didn't recognise, something grown-up and woody, a long way from the vanilla body spray they'd both bought in Boots at fourteen and worn until everyone in their year complained. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there. Twenty-five, the both of them. Neither of them old. But it had been three years, and three years was apparently enough to change the architecture of a face.
"You're in London," Bethan said.
"I am."
"Your mam said you'd moved, but she was a bit—vague."
"She would be."
"I bumped into her in Waitrose. Llandaff. Christmas before last." Bethan turned the stem of an empty wine glass between her fingers. "She asked if I'd heard from you. I said I thought she'd know better than me. I think that was the wrong thing to say."
Rory drank. The whisky was the good one, the one Silas didn't put on the chalkboard. "She knows where I am."
"Right. Good." A pause. "What are you—sorry. What are you doing? For work."
Rory lifted the edge of her jacket, where the Golden Empress logo was stitched in tired gold thread over her heart. A dragon, or a snake with legs. Yu-Fei had never been clear.
Bethan looked at it for a second too long. Rory watched her try to find a face to wear and fail, and felt a small, mean flare of satisfaction, and then felt ashamed of it, and then felt tired.
"Delivery," Rory said. "Part-time."
"Oh. That's—good. Flexible."
"It is flexible."
"And the law thing?"
"Didn't finish."
"No, I—" Bethan nodded quickly . "I know. I heard."
Of course she'd heard. Cardiff was a city that pretended to be a village whenever there was gossip to be had. Brendan Carter's daughter walked out of her final year. Brendan Carter's daughter moved to London with no job and no flat. Brendan Carter's daughter, who used to argue him into corners at the dinner table for fun, who was going to be sharper than him, everyone said so.
"You're at the bar, then," Rory said. It wasn't a question. It was the shoes.
"Pupillage. Well, tenant now, just about. Chambers in Temple." Bethan hesitated, then said it anyway, because Bethan had always said things anyway. "Your dad wrote me a reference."
Rory set her glass down very precisely on the ring of water it had already left.
"He was lovely about it," Bethan went on, faster now. "He took me for lunch. He talked about you the whole time, actually. Not in a bad way. He just—he kept saying things like 'Aurora would have torn that argument apart' and then he'd go quiet. I didn't know what to say to him."
"No," Rory said. "Nobody does."
Across the room, one of Bethan's friends laughed too loudly. The tall man was pouring the Rioja himself now, having given up waiting.
Bethan looked at her hands. Her nails were short and clean and unpainted, and Rory remembered her biting them bloody in the library during first-year exams, remembered pulling her hand away from her mouth and saying *stop, you'll get hepatitis,* and Bethan laughing so hard the librarian came over.
"Is he still—" Bethan started.
"No."
"Okay."
"Not for a long time."
"Okay." Bethan breathed out. "Good. God. Good."
Neither of them said his name. Evan sat between them anyway, on the stool that Bethan was occupying , in the silence that followed. Rory could feel him there the way she could feel weather coming in her joints. Bethan had met him first. That was the thing. Bethan had met him at some society do, a rugby-club boy with good teeth, and brought him to the pub, and said *Rory, this is Evan, he's an absolute laugh,* and he had been. For a while.
"I should have said something," Bethan said to the empty wine glass. "That summer. When you stopped coming out. When you'd cancel and then text me later from the toilet at his flat. I knew. I think I knew. I told myself you'd tell me if it was bad, because you were always the one who—you always knew what to do. You were never the one who needed anybody."
Rory turned the whisky glass a quarter turn on the wood. Then another quarter turn.
What she wanted to say was: *I needed you.* What she wanted to say was: *I texted you from the toilet because it was the only door that locked, and you sent me back a crying-laughing face, and I sat on the floor with my back against the bath and read it over and over.* What she wanted to say was: *it wasn't your job.* All of those were true. None of them would fit through her throat.
"It was a long time ago," she said instead .
"It was three years."
"That's a long time."
Bethan looked at her then, properly, and Rory let herself be looked at. The cropped hair. The jacket. The helmet on the next stool. The small crescent scar on her left wrist that Bethan had seen a hundred times and had once asked about, at eleven, and been told the truth: a broken jam jar, a garden wall, a lot of blood and not much drama. It was the only part of her that hadn't changed.
"You're different," Bethan said quietly.
"Yeah."
"I don't mean—I mean you seem—" She searched for it. "Still. You used to fill a room. You'd walk in and everyone would turn around. Now you're sitting in the corner with your back to the wall."
"It's a good corner."
Bethan almost smiled. "Is it, though?"
Rory thought about it honestly, which was a courtesy she did not extend to many people anymore. She thought about the flat upstairs with its crooked window and its radiator that knocked like someone wanting to be let in. About Eva ringing at two in the morning three years ago and saying *get on a train, I don't care which one.* About Silas, who had never once asked her why she flinched when men raised their voices in the bar, who had simply started asking them to leave.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
Bethan held her gaze for a moment, then nodded, and something in her shoulders let go. She opened her handbag and took out a card, cream, embossed, her name in small serious capitals, and slid it across the bar the way Silas had slid the whisky.
"In case," she said. "I don't know. In case you ever want to get a coffee. Or not. You don't have to."
"I know I don't."
"Right." Bethan stood. She picked up the empty glass she'd been fidgeting with, then put it back down, then picked it up again. "It's really good to see you, Rory."
It was the first time she'd used the name. It landed somewhere under Rory's sternum and stayed there.
"You too, Beth."
She went back to her table. Rory watched her in the mirror, watched the tall man ask something and Bethan shake her head, watched her sit with her back to the bar and not turn around once.
Silas drifted back down the counter. He topped up her glass without asking and looked at the card lying face-up on the wood.
"Friend of yours?"
Rory considered the card for a long time. Then she picked it up and tucked it into the inside pocket of her jacket, behind the Golden Empress dragon, next to her heart, where it would probably stay unread for months.
"She was," she said.
Silas nodded as if that were a complete answer, and in the Nest, it was.