Run: 2026-09-23-01M37Q7BEETT7YVSN3PTX57G54

The rain had followed Rory in off Greek Street, and it clung to the shoulders of her Golden Empress jacket as she hunched over the bar. Eleven deliveries tonight. One tip, and that one was a pound coin with gum on the back. She peeled her gloves off finger by finger and laid them beside the pint Silas had already poured before she'd reached the stool. "Rough one?" Silas leaned on his forearms, the signet ring catching the green wash from the window. "A man in Fitzrovia asked if I'd licked his prawn crackers. Because the bag was open. The bag is always open, Si. It's how the steam gets out." "Did you lick them?" "Not his." He huffed something close to a laugh and limped off to serve a pair of tourists squinting at the photographs over the till. Rory drank. The Nest hummed at its usual Thursday pitch: low talk, a clink of glassware, the Pogues muttering from a speaker nobody had ever found. She liked it best like this, busy enough that no one looked at anyone. The door opened. Cold air swept across her ankles, and with it came laughter, the brash, braying laughter of people in good coats who had come from somewhere with tablecloths. Four of them. Three men in loosened ties, and a woman in a camel wool coat shaking the wet off an umbrella. Rory knew the laugh before she knew the face. It went up at the end, a hiccup of a thing, like a kettle clicking off. She turned back to her pint. Studied the foam. The woman's heels crossed the floorboards, paused, came closer. "No. No way. Rory?" Nia Pritchard. The same freckles, though she'd learnt to powder them. The same gap between her front teeth she'd sworn at nineteen she'd get fixed and apparently never had. Her hair was shorter, glossier, the kind of blonde that cost money every six weeks. "Hiya, Nia." "Oh my God." Nia's hand hovered, uncertain whether to go for a hug, then settled on Rory's arm and gave it a squeeze through the damp nylon. "Oh my God, look at you. Your hair. You had it down to your bum." "I got bored of it." "You got bored of it." Nia laughed, and it came out thinner this time. She glanced back at her colleagues, who had colonised a booth beneath a framed map of Constantinople. "Give me a sec. Don't move." She went, said something that made the men wave indifferent hands, and came back without her coat. Under it she wore a navy suit with a pin on the lapel, a little silver set of scales. She took the stool beside Rory and set her clutch on the bar as if it were something she might have to defend. "What are you drinking?" "I'm fine." "Rory, let me buy you a drink." Silas drifted over, polishing a glass that didn't need it. His hazel eyes moved from Nia to Rory and stayed there. "Gin and tonic, please. And whatever she's having." Nia tapped the bar. "We shared a house. Cathays. Second and third year. She used to steal my yoghurts." "Did she." "Labelled them and everything. Didn't matter." "You labelled them 'NIA'S, BITCH,'" Rory said. "It was a challenge, not a warning." Silas set the gin down, topped Rory's pint without being asked, and retreated to the far end of the bar. Not far enough to be out of earshot. He never went that far. Nia stirred her drink with the little black straw and didn't drink it. "You look different." "Short hair'll do that." "It's not the hair." She said it to the gin, not to Rory. "You used to take up a whole room. Remember Tomos's twenty-first? You climbed onto the pool table and did the whole of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' with a cue for a microphone. Every part. Even the Galileos." "I remember being sick in his mam's hydrangeas." "That too." Nia smiled, and it faded fast. "Where did you go? You were just gone. Your number stopped working. Your Facebook went. I rang your mum's house and she said you were fine, and then she said I should stop ringing." "Mam's protective." "I was worried." Rory turned the pint glass a quarter-turn on its mat. The mat had a raven on it, wings half-open. "Are you a barrister, then? Like you wanted?" "Solicitor. Commercial property. Holborn." Nia touched the scales pin as if she'd forgotten it was there. "It's all leases. Break clauses. Very glamorous. And you're..." Her eyes went to the jacket, to the embroidered gold dragon coiled across the breast pocket. "I deliver Chinese food." "Right. That's..." "You can say it." "I wasn't going to say anything." Nia finally took a sip. "You were top of our year in contract. Professor Hale wanted you for his research thing. You were going to be a QC by forty, that's what you told everyone. Your dad had the whole thing planned." "My dad had it planned." The music changed. Something with a fiddle. At the booth, one of Nia's colleagues shouted about a cricket score and the others booed him. Nia didn't look round. "Evan asked after you." Rory's thumb found the crescent on her left wrist, the little pale moon she'd earned falling off a garden wall at seven. She pressed it. Pressed it harder. "When?" "Last year. Christmas. There was a reunion thing at the Pen and Wig. He turned up. He's in Bristol now, doing something with insurance. He asked if I'd heard from you. He was very..." Nia searched for the word. "Casual. Too casual, I thought." "What did you tell him?" "That I hadn't. Which was true." Nia set the glass down. "Rory, I haven't told anyone anything. I didn't have anything to tell." "Good." "Is that why you left?" Rory said nothing. At the end of the bar, Silas had stopped pretending to polish. He stood with the cloth folded in one big hand, watching the door. Nia exhaled through her nose, long and slow, the way she used to before exams. "The Law Ball. Third year. You wore that green dress with the open back, and you kept your cardigan on all night, even when we were dancing, even when it was boiling in there. And in the loos, when you took it off to fix your strap, I saw your arm." She stopped. Started again. "Four marks. Here." She touched her own upper arm, just below the shoulder, with four fingertips. "Like a hand." "Nia." "I saw it, and I looked at you, and you looked at me in the mirror, and I said, 'Your lipstick's smudged.' That's what I said. 'Your lipstick's smudged.' And I gave you a tissue." "I remember." "I've thought about that tissue for six years." The gin sweated a ring onto the wood. Neither of them touched it. "You were twenty-one," Rory said. "What were you supposed to do? March out and punch him?" "I could have asked." "I'd have lied." "I know. I'd still have asked." Nia's voice cracked right down the middle, and she covered it by clearing her throat, the solicitor clawing her back into shape. "I told myself it was your business. That you were cleverer than me, so you'd have sorted it. That's what I told myself. You were always the one who worked things out." "I did work it out. It just took me longer than it should have." "And you came here." "Eva was here." "Eva Morgan? From the year below?" Nia blinked. "She knew?" "She knew because she asked." That landed. Rory watched it land: the small flinch at the corner of Nia's mouth, the way her fingers tightened on the stem of nothing. Rory had not meant it as a knife. She'd only meant it as a fact. In this room, facts had a way of turning into knives. "Sorry," Rory said. "That came out wrong." "No. It came out fine." Silas returned, set a bowl of salted almonds between them, and said nothing at all. Nia glanced up at him, then at Rory, as if seeing the shape of something she hadn't been told. "He looks after you." "He's my landlord." "That's not what I said." Rory took an almond. Didn't eat it. Rolled it between finger and thumb until the salt came off on her skin. "You still do that thing," Nia said. "With your hands. When you don't want to talk. You used to do it with bottle caps in the library." "I don't do anything." "You're doing it now." Rory put the almond down. Across the room, one of the men in the booth stood and called Nia's name, holding up an empty glass and waggling it. She raised a palm without turning: in a minute. He sat back down. "I'm not asking you to forgive me," Nia said. "I don't even know if there's anything to forgive. I just wanted you to know that I saw it. That someone saw it. That I didn't just not notice." "I think that's worse, Nia." "Yeah." She nodded, slow, several times. "Yeah, I think it probably is." The fiddle song ended. For three seconds the speaker hissed empty before the next track caught, and in that gap Rory heard the rain hammering the pavement outside, the green neon buzzing over the door, Silas setting a glass down very gently at the far end of the bar. Nia opened her clutch, took out a business card, and slid it along the wood until it stopped against Rory's gloves. Cream card. Embossed letters. A mobile number written in biro on the back, the sevens crossed the way their Year Nine teacher had made them all do it. "That's my own phone. Not the work one." Rory looked at the card and didn't pick it up. "You don't have to ring," Nia said. "I just didn't want to walk out of here and have it be another tissue."