Run: 2026-09-23-01M37Q14TQDGTHQF6A20RY85HV

The green neon above the door buzzed like a trapped wasp, and every time someone came in from Greek Street the light spilled across the floorboards and turned the spilled lager to absinthe. Rory had claimed the stool at the far end of the bar, the one with its back to the old tube map of 1936 and a clear line to the entrance. Her delivery jacket hung off the next stool, still smelling of five-spice and diesel. Silas slid a glass of whisky across the wood without being asked, a finger's width, no ice. "Twelve drops tonight. Your rider app says you made eleven." "The twelfth was a man in Covent Garden who opened the door in a towel and wanted to pay in compliments." "And?" "And I left the chow mein on the step and took his compliments with me." Silas's beard twitched. He limped off towards a pair of students arguing over the jukebox, favouring the left knee the way he did after closing time, when he thought nobody watched. The door opened. Cold air, a burst of laughter, five people in good wool coats shaking the drizzle off their shoulders. Lanyards still around their necks. A conference at the Law Society, from the look of them, or a chambers outing that had wandered too far from Chancery Lane. They colonised the booth beneath the photographs of Soho in the fifties, and one of them, a woman with a copper bob and a laugh that climbed at the end of every sentence, came to the bar to order. Rory knew the laugh before she knew the face. She turned the whisky glass a quarter turn on its coaster. Then another. The woman leaned across the bar, called something to Silas about gin, and let her gaze slide along the counter the way people do when they wait. It passed over Rory. Stopped. Came back. "No." The woman pressed a hand flat against her sternum. "No, no. Rory Carter?" "Hello, Nia." "Oh my God. Oh my *God*." Nia abandoned her place at the till and came down the length of the bar, arms already opening, and Rory stood because there was nothing else to do. The hug smelled of Jo Malone and the inside of a taxi. Nia held on a beat longer than Rory did. "You cut your hair." "Five years ago." "It used to go all the way to your—" Nia made a slicing gesture at her waist and laughed again, higher this time. "You look so different. Good different. Sharp. What are you doing in *Soho*?" "Drinking." "Well, obviously." Nia glanced at the delivery jacket, at the Golden Empress logo stitched in gold thread across the back, and Rory watched her decide not to ask. "I'm here for three days. Continuing professional development. Which means a lot of men from Leeds explaining arbitration to me over canapés." She hitched herself onto the stool without moving the jacket, perched on its edge. "Christ. Rory Carter. Your mam told mine you'd gone to London, but she made it sound like you'd joined a convent." "Something like that." Silas returned, set a gin and tonic in front of Nia with a wedge of cucumber she hadn't asked for, and looked at Rory for exactly one second. Rory gave him a small shake of the head. He moved off to polish glasses that were already clean. "Is that your boyfriend?" Nia whispered. "He's a bit—" "He's my landlord." "Oh. Right." Nia stirred her drink with the little black straw. Her nails were done, a pale pink, and a ring with a square diamond caught the green light. "I'm in your dad's chambers now, did you know? Pupillage and then tenancy. He's been brilliant, honestly. He took me on the Harrington fraud case last spring, second junior. He talks about you." "What does he say?" Nia opened her mouth. Closed it. "That you were the cleverest one of all of us. That you had the best instincts in the year and threw them in the Taff." "That sounds like him." "He misses you, Rory." "He has my number." "Does he?" Nia set the straw down. "Because I don't. I texted you for about a year. Birthday, Christmas, that time Ffion got married in the castle and there was a swan that attacked the harpist. Nothing. The number just stopped going blue." Rory lifted the whisky and drank, and the heat went down slow. Behind the bar the till drawer rattled shut. "I changed it." "I gathered." The students at the jukebox had settled on something by The Smiths. Morrissey began to moan about a light that never goes out. Nia glanced towards her booth, where one of the men in wool was holding his phone up to film a photograph on the wall, and she turned her back on them. "I thought I'd done something," she said. "For ages. I went through it all in my head. Was it the thing at Lucy's party, when I told Evan you'd been a nightmare in halls? Because I was joking, it was a joke—" "It wasn't the party." "Then what?" Rory looked at her. At the freckles Nia still hid under foundation, at the small chip in her front tooth from the day they'd both fallen off the wall behind the Pryces' garden on Heol Llanishen, nine years old, racing to see who could reach the pear tree first. Rory had caught a rusted fence post on the way down. She rubbed her thumb across the crescent on the inside of her left wrist. Nia's eyes followed it. "You still have that." "Scars don't really leave." "Your mam went spare. She thought my dad should have put a proper fence up." Nia huffed something that wanted to be a laugh and wasn't. "He did, after. Built it himself. It's still there." "Good fence?" "Terrible fence. Leans like a drunk." For a moment they both smiled, and it came so easily, the way it used to across a lecture hall or a pub table in Cathays. Then it was gone, and the air between them felt heavier for having been lightened. "Evan's engaged," Nia said. Rory's hand went still on the glass. "I thought you should know. In case you heard it somewhere else. She's a vet. From Penarth. I met her at a thing, she seems—" Nia stopped. Her jaw worked. "She seems nice." "I'm sure she is." "Rory." "Don't." "I saw you." Nia's voice dropped under the music. "At Ffion's twenty-first. In the toilets. You had your sleeve pushed up to wash your hands and there were marks, here." She touched her own forearm, four fingertips in a row. "And you pulled the sleeve down and you looked at me in the mirror, and I said your eyeliner was smudged." The Smiths gave way to silence while the jukebox thought about its next choice. Somebody in the booth called Nia's name. She didn't turn around. "I said your eyeliner was smudged," she repeated, "and I went back out and danced." "I remember." "I've thought about it every day since you left. Every single day. I'd see him at the Cricketers, and he'd buy a round, and I'd let him buy it. I'd let him ask how you were, like he didn't know. Like he was worried." Nia's eyes had gone glassy, and she blinked hard against it, furious at herself. "I'm a barrister, Rory. I stand up in court and tell juries that silence is a choice. And I stood there in a toilet in the Park Plaza and chose it." Rory set her glass down. Across the room Silas had stopped polishing. He didn't look over, but the cloth hung still in his hand. "You were twenty-one," Rory said. "So were you." "I didn't tell anyone either. Not you, not my dad, not the doctor at the Heath who asked how I'd managed to sprain two fingers opening a jar. I had a whole story about that jar." She turned her wrist over, looked at the old scar, pale against the blue veins. "Eva got me out. She rang me one night and didn't ask me anything. She just said there's a train at six, and I got on it." "I should have been the one to ring." "Maybe. But you didn't, and I didn't pick up when you did. We can stand here and split the blame down the middle like a bill, Nia, but it won't buy anything." Nia wiped under one eye with the knuckle of her ring finger, careful of the makeup. The diamond flashed. Rory nodded at it. "Who's the lucky man?" "Tom. Tom Rees. Rugby Tom, from Bute Street. You used to call him the Wardrobe." "The Wardrobe." Rory felt her mouth pull up at one corner. "He carried both of us home from the Tafarn once. One on each shoulder." "He still tells that story. He tells it wrong. He says you were singing Shirley Bassey." "I *was* singing Shirley Bassey." "You were singing *at* Shirley Bassey. It was a poster in a window." The booth called again, louder. One of the wool coats had stood up and was miming a drink at his mouth, pointing at the bar. Nia raised a hand without looking at him. "The wedding's in June," she said. "St Fagans. The old chapel they moved there, stone by stone." She took a breath. "I'd want you there. I know that's— I know. But I would." Rory said nothing. She watched the neon make green ghosts in the bottom of her empty glass. Silas limped back down the bar, took the glass, and replaced it with another finger of whisky and a small dish of salted almonds he'd never once put out for anyone in the eighteen months she'd lived upstairs. Nia reached into her coat, found a business card, and slid it across the wood. Cream stock. Embossed. *Nia Pryce, Barrister. Carter Chambers.* Her father's name, pressed into the paper under someone else's. "My mobile's on the back," Nia said. "Handwritten. It's the same number it always was. I never changed it." Rory looked at the card. She didn't pick it up. She didn't push it away either. "Your gin's going warm," she said. Nia laughed, wet, and for a second she was nine again at the top of a garden wall, one knee scraped raw, daring Rory to jump first.