AI The rain had followed Rory in from Dean Street, and it clung to the shoulders of her jacket as she settled onto the last stool at the end of the bar. Her back was to the wall. She hadn't chosen the seat so much as her body had chosen it for her, the way it chose most things lately: the exit in the corner of her eye, the long mirror behind the bottles that showed her the door without her having to turn her head.
Silas set a whisky in front of her without being asked . He moved down the bar with that faint hitch in his left leg, the one he never mentioned and never let slow him , and the green neon from the sign outside bled through the front window and washed the old maps on the walls the colour of pond water.
"Long night?" he asked.
"Eleven deliveries. One man in Fitzrovia tipped me a pound and a lecture about cycle lanes." She wrapped her hand around the glass. "Yu-Fei says I'm her best rider. I think she says that to all of us."
"She doesn't." Silas turned his signet ring once on his right hand, a small, absent habit. "She told me you're the only one who's never lost a carton of soup."
Rory almost smiled. Then the door opened, and the laughter came in with the cold.
Four of them, shaking out umbrellas, lanyards still tucked into their coats from some conference. Solicitors, by the look of the shoes. Rory had grown up around those shoes. She watched them in the mirror the way she watched everyone now, and her eyes slid across the tallest woman, then snagged and came back.
Dark blonde hair cut shorter than it used to be. The same way of standing with her weight on one hip, as though she'd just been interrupted mid-argument and was waiting for her turn.
Nia Pritchard.
Rory looked down at her drink. There was still time. The back room, the bookshelf, the stairs up to the flat. Silas would cover for her without a question. She could be gone before the round was ordered .
She didn't move. Afterwards she would wonder about that.
"Sorry, excuse me, could we get—" Nia was at the bar, leaning in, and then she stopped. Rory felt the stare land on the side of her face like a hand. "Aurora?"
Nobody had called her that in a voice with Cardiff in it for three years. The name went through her like cold water.
"Hi, Nia."
"Oh my God ." Nia laughed, a startled, breathless sound, and for a moment she looked nineteen again, barefoot in the kitchen of their flat on Cathays Terrace, burning toast and quoting tort law at the smoke alarm. "Oh my *God *. What are you— you're in *London *?"
"I live here."
"Since when?"
Rory turned the glass a quarter-turn on the bar. "A while."
Nia's colleagues had drifted toward a booth beneath the black-and-white photographs. One of them called her name. Nia waved without looking back and slid onto the stool beside Rory, uninvited, as she'd always done everything.
"Your hair," Nia said.
Rory touched it before she could stop herself. Straight, black, stopping at her shoulders. At university it had reached halfway down her back. Evan had liked it long. She'd cut it herself in Eva's bathroom the second night in London , with kitchen scissors, and hadn't let anyone fix the uneven ends for a month.
"Needed a change."
"It suits you. You look —" Nia searched for the word, and Rory watched her decide against several. "Different."
"That's the idea."
Silas appeared, unhurried, and set down a glass of white wine in front of Nia that she hadn't ordered. She blinked up at him . He gave her the small courteous nod he gave strangers and moved away again, and Rory knew he'd drift back within earshot and never seem to be listening.
"Is he—" Nia began.
"My landlord. I live upstairs."
"Above a *pub *." Nia shook her head slowly . "Your father would have a stroke."
"My father," Rory said, "doesn't have to know where I live."
It came out harder than she'd meant. Nia's smile flickered and steadied.
"I see him sometimes. Brendan. At the Crown Court." She sipped her wine . "He cross-examined one of my witnesses last spring. Took her apart. Very politely, of course. He asked me if I'd heard from you."
Rory kept her eyes on the mirror. Behind them, one of the solicitors was telling a story with his hands.
"What did you say?"
"The truth. That I hadn't." Nia set her glass down with great care. "Not since the Christmas before last. You sent a card. It just said *thinking of you *. No return address. I kept it on the fridge until Tom asked who it was from, and I realised I didn't know how to explain."
"Tom?"
"My husband." She held up her left hand, and the ring caught the neon. "We got married in June. The year before last."
The words went into Rory quietly and stayed there. June. She tried to remember that June. She remembered the flat in Pontcanna with the blinds always down. She remembered Evan reading her phone at the kitchen table, scrolling with one finger, unhurried, the way you'd look for a hair in your soup. She remembered deleting a message thread, and the relief of it, and the shame of the relief.
"You sent me an invitation," she said.
"Three. I thought the first two got lost." Nia gave a short laugh that didn't have much in it. "Then I stopped sending them. I thought, well. She's made her choice. People drift. That's what everyone kept telling me. People drift."
"Nia—"
"I was so angry with you, Ror." The old nickname slipped out, and Nia seemed as startled by it as Rory was. "You were supposed to be my maid of honour. We'd planned it. Second year, remember, on the roof with that terrible cava? You made me swear I wouldn't let my mother pick the flowers."
"I remember."
"And then you were just gone. You quit the course. You stopped answering. I'd see you in town sometimes with *him *, and you'd look straight through me like I was a lamppost." Nia stopped. Her jaw worked. "I'm sorry. That's not— I didn't come in here to do this."
"You didn't know I'd be here."
"No." Nia looked at her properly then, and Rory felt herself being read, the way good lawyers read a witness: not the words but the hands, the shoulders, the place the eyes went . "Where is he? Evan?"
Rory said nothing for a long moment. In the corner, the radiator ticked. Somewhere down the bar, Silas dried a glass that was already dry.
"Cardiff," she said at last . "I assume."
"You assume."
"I left." The words were small and flat and cost more than they sounded. "Eva came and got me. I didn't bring much."
She watched understanding arrive in Nia's face, not all at once but in pieces, the way damp spreads across a ceiling . The unanswered messages. The lamppost stare. The card with no address.
"Oh," Nia said. Just that. Then, very quietly, "Oh, Rory."
Nia's hand moved across the bar and closed over Rory's left wrist, her thumb resting on the little crescent scar there, and Rory remembered with sudden, terrible clarity that Nia used to do exactly this during exams, when Rory's leg wouldn't stop jiggling under the desk. *You fell off a wall when you were seven *, Nia used to say, tracing it. *You survived that. You'll survive contract law.*
Rory didn't pull away. She wanted to. She wanted to so badly that her whole arm hummed with it.
"I should have kept sending them," Nia said. "The invitations. I should have come to the flat."
"He wouldn't have let you in."
"I should have tried anyway."
"And I should have answered." Rory made herself look at her. "I read every one, you know. The messages. I'd read them in the bathroom with the tap running and then delete them. Every one. I knew about the job at Morgan Cole. I knew when your nan died." Her throat tightened. "I didn't send flowers."
Nia's eyes had gone bright. She blinked hard and looked up at the ceiling, at the old map of the Baltic pinned there, yellowed at the edges.
"You'd have been a brilliant barrister," she said. "You know that? Better than your dad. Better than me."
"I'd have been miserable."
"Are you happy now?"
Rory considered the question honestly, which was more than she'd have done three years ago. The bicycle and the cold and the carton of soup. The flat upstairs with the window that didn't quite close . Silas at the end of the bar, not listening.
"I'm here," she said. "Most days that's enough."
From the booth, someone called Nia's name again, louder. She let go of Rory's wrist, slowly , the way you'd set down something you weren't sure would stay upright on its own. She dug in her coat, found a business card and a pen, and wrote a number on the back in her familiar slanted hand.
"My mobile. The real one." She pushed it across the bar. "I'm here till Thursday. And I'm in Cardiff always. Tom makes a very bad curry. You'd hate it."
"I'd probably love it."
"You'd lie and say you loved it. You always did." Nia stood, hesitated, then leaned down and pressed her cheek briefly to Rory's hair. She smelled of rain and some expensive perfume Rory didn't recognise. The girl on Cathays Terrace had smelled of burnt toast and cheap vanilla.
Then she was gone, back to the booth and the loud man and the life with the ring in it.
Rory sat with the card in front of her for a long time. The whisky had gone warm. The neon outside buzzed and flickered , green, green, green.
Silas came back down the bar and topped up her glass without comment. His gaze rested for a moment on the card, then on her face.
"Old friend?" he said.
"She used to be." Rory picked up the card and turned it over in her fingers, the numbers blurring slightly . "I don't know what she is now."
"That's usually how it goes." He turned the silver ring on his hand, once, and looked for a moment at nothing, at some city that wasn't this one. "The ones worth keeping, you have to meet twice."
Rory slid the card into the inside pocket of her jacket, against her chest, where it sat like something warm she hadn't earned yet.
She didn't look at the mirror again. She didn't need to see the door.