Run: 2026-09-23-01M37PY0EGA9VD4M5TMMSR0XAD

The Golden Empress thermal bag sat on the stool beside Rory, still smelling of five-spice and the plastic sweat of a dozen cartons. She had delivered the last order to a flat in Dean Street where a man in a dressing gown paid in coins and counted every one of them twice. Now she wanted a pint, the corner seat, and forty minutes where nobody asked her for anything. Silas set the glass in front of her without being asked. The silver ring on his right hand clicked against the wood. "Tip?" "Two pence short of the bill. He apologised to the two pence, not to me." "Generous of him." He limped off toward the taps, favouring the left leg the way he did when rain was coming. Rory drank and watched the room in the long mirror behind the optics. It was a habit Silas had never taught her and never needed to. Thursday crowd. Two regulars arguing over a darts score nobody was keeping. A couple on a first date, the woman laughing a half-second too late at everything. The old maps on the walls gone amber under the lamps, Prague and Vienna and a Berlin that no longer existed. The door opened. Green neon from the sign outside spilled across the floorboards, and five people in good coats came in on a gust of cold and wine. Lawyers. Rory could tell from the shoes, and from the way they spoke as though the room had been booked for them. She knew that voice. She had grown up across the dinner table from it. The third one in wore a camel coat and a burgundy scarf and her hair in the same thick copper plait she had worn at nineteen, only neater now, pinned up in a way that said someone paid for it. Rory looked back at her pint. It lasted about ninety seconds. "No. No way. Aurora?" The voice cut straight through the darts argument. Rory turned. Bethan Pryce stood three feet away with her mouth open, one glove off and the other forgotten on her hand. "Hiya, Beth." "Hiya, Beth? That's it? Four years and I get hiya?" Bethan laughed, a big Valleys laugh the chambers hadn't managed to sand down. She pulled the second glove off and flapped it. "Your hair. What did you do to your hair?" "Cut it." "I can see that. It used to be down to here." She put a hand flat against her own ribs. "You used to sit on it in lectures. You'd stand up and yank your own head back." "That's why I cut it." One of the good coats called Bethan's name from the far end of the bar. She waved a hand over her shoulder without looking and hooked the empty stool on Rory's other side with her foot. She eyed the thermal bag and the red logo on it, a dragon curled around a bowl. "You're working for a takeaway?" "Delivering for one." "Right." Bethan sat. "Right. Okay." Silas drifted back down the bar with a cloth over his shoulder. He looked at Bethan for exactly as long as it took to read her, then at Rory, and raised one eyebrow a millimetre. "Friend of yours?" "From Cardiff. Uni." "What are you drinking, friend from Cardiff?" "Oh. Um. Whatever she's having, please." Bethan watched him go. She leaned in. "He's a bit intense." "He's all right." "You know him?" "I live upstairs." Bethan turned on the stool and looked at the ceiling as if she could see through it to the flat, to the single bed and the kettle and the window that faced the back of a Chinese supermarket. When she turned back, something had shifted in her face. The laugh was still there, but it had gone behind glass. "Your dad said you were in London. That's all he said. I rang him, you know. After you went. I rang the house three times and your mam answered once and she just cried and said you were safe, and then Brendan got on the phone and asked me if I'd had any contact, like I was a witness. Like he was taking a statement." "That sounds like him." "You didn't answer my texts." "I got a new phone." "You could have told me the number." Silas put the pint down in front of Bethan and was gone again before she could thank him. She wrapped both hands round the glass and didn't drink. "I'm in pupillage," she offered. "Gray's Inn. Criminal. I finally got one, third round of applications. Everyone I trained with thinks I'm mad, the money's shocking." "Congratulations. You always wanted crime." "You were meant to be doing it with me. That was the plan. Carter and Pryce. We had the letterhead drawn on a napkin in the Students' Union." Bethan turned the glass a quarter-turn on its mat. "You were better than me at it. You know that? You'd take the other side in seminars just to see if you could win, and you always won. Dr Harris used to go purple." "I hated it, Beth." "You didn't." "I did. I hated every minute. I was good at it because Dad was good at it, and I'd been listening to him argue since I could walk. That's not the same as wanting it." Bethan opened her mouth and shut it again. At the far end of the bar the good coats had found a table and someone was ordering a bottle of something French. Silas poured it with his back to them, and Rory could see his reflection in the mirror, and she knew he was listening the way he listened to everything, without appearing to. "Do you still see him?" Rory asked. She didn't need to say the name. Bethan's hands went still on the glass. "Evan?" "Yeah." "Not really. He's in Bristol now. I think he's with someone. There's a girl in the photos." Bethan picked at the corner of the beer mat with her thumbnail. It came up in a soft grey curl. "He messaged me once, the first summer. Asked if I knew where you were. I said no." "You didn't know where I was." "I know. But I would have said no anyway." She tore the curl of cardboard free. "I want you to know that. I would have said no." Rory looked at her. The plait. The good coat. The small gold studs in her ears that she would never have bought for herself at nineteen. Under all of it, the same freckle below her left eye, the same way she chewed the inside of her cheek when she was about to say something she had rehearsed. "You said something once," Bethan went on. "In the kitchen at Senghennydd Road. At that party. You came in to get ice and you had your sleeve pulled down over your hand, and you said, he doesn't like it when I go out without him. And I said—" "I remember what you said." "I said, aww, that's sweet, he misses you." Bethan pressed her lips together. Her eyes had gone bright. "I thought it was sweet. I actually thought it was sweet. I was so jealous of you that night, Rory. He was gorgeous and he was clever and he looked at you like you were the only person in the room, and I went home and cried because nobody looked at me like that." Rory turned her left wrist over on the bar. The little crescent scar caught the lamp. Old and white, from a garden gate when she was seven. Not from Evan. Evan had been more careful than that. "He did look at me like that." "Rory—" "He did. That was the problem. He never looked anywhere else." The darts regulars had stopped arguing. One of them was trying to buy the first-date woman a drink and her date was pretending not to notice. The Nest held its noise the way it always did, low and brown and forgiving, and for a moment the two of them sat inside it without speaking. Bethan drank at last. Half the pint in one go. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, the way she used to before anyone had taught her not to. "You look different." "You said. The hair." "Not the hair." She searched Rory's face as if she was reading a document for the clause that mattered. "You used to talk with your hands. You used to fill up every silence, you couldn't stand one. Now you're just sitting there. You're watching the door." "Am I?" "You've looked at it four times since I sat down." Rory hadn't counted. She glanced at the mirror and found Silas's eyes in it, level and hazel and giving nothing away. He went back to his glasses. "It's a bar in Soho," she offered. "You watch the door." "That's not what I mean and you know it." "I know." Bethan laughed again, smaller this time, and shook her head. She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and unlocked it and slid it across the bar. "Put your number in. Your real one. Not a takeaway one." Rory looked at the screen. The keypad glowed. Behind the numbers was a photograph of Bethan and a dark-haired man on a beach somewhere with white cliffs, both of them squinting into the sun and grinning like idiots. A life. A whole one, built in the four years Rory had spent learning which floorboards on the stairs creaked and which ones didn't. Her thumb hovered. From the table of good coats someone called, "Beth! Are you having the red or not?" Bethan didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on Rory's hand, on the thumb above the glass, and she waited.