Run: 2026-10-05-01M46BGP309A0GQKRM7K5MQMCE

Rory had spread the delivery receipts across the bar in four rows when a woman put a wet umbrella down on the last one. “Sorry. I thought that was rubbish.” “It’s most of my wages.” The woman lifted the umbrella. Water had softened the thermal paper, turning the printed total into a grey thumbprint. Rory drew the receipt towards her and flattened it against the wood. “Seventeen pounds forty, if you’re offering to replace it.” “Rory?” She looked up. The woman wore a charcoal coat with a collar that stood clear of her neck. Her black hair stopped at her jaw, cut to expose the small gold rings in her ears. Rory recognised the left ear first: the notch near the top, where a safety pin had caught during a party in their first year. “Nia?” Nia’s mouth opened, then drew into a smile that seemed to require permission from the rest of her face. “God. Your hair.” “You’ve got less of yours.” “I paid a hundred and twenty pounds for that observation.” Rory laughed. The sound came out too loud in the nearly empty bar. Behind Nia, rain gathered on the front window beneath the green neon lettering. A man in a delivery jacket stood outside, turning his phone under the shelter of his sleeve. Rory had done the same thing twenty minutes earlier. She still wore the Golden Empress fleece, its embroidered dragon losing threads along one wing. Nia looked at it. “You work here?” “No. Silas tolerates me here.” At the far end of the counter, Silas raised his head from a ledger. His silver signet ring held down a curling page. “Within limits.” “This is Nia. We were at university together.” “Then you’ve earned a drink.” Nia glanced towards the bottles, then at the clock above them. “White wine, please.” “Anything more specific?” “Cold.” Silas closed the ledger. His left leg stiffened as he crossed behind the bar, and Nia moved her bag from the stool beside Rory without being asked. Rory watched her hang it from the brass hook beneath the counter. The bag had corners. Nia’s old bags had been canvas sacks that carried books, loose tobacco, oranges, a fork stolen from a café. Once, a wet swimming costume had stayed in one for a week. “What are you doing in Soho?” “Meeting. I came out at the wrong end of the street and it started raining.” “You used to object to umbrellas.” “I used to object to quite a lot.” Silas set down her glass. “And for you, Rory?” “Tea, if there’s any left.” “There’s a kettle. We remain a thriving concern.” He took the chipped mug from beneath the counter. Rory had broken its handle in November and kept using it, her palm cupped around the place where the glaze had roughened. Nia unbuttoned her coat but did not take it off. “How long have you been in London?” “Three years.” “Three?” “Nearly four.” “I thought you were still in Cardiff.” Rory moved one receipt into another row. “I wasn’t.” Outside, the delivery rider gave up on his phone and walked his bicycle into the rain. “I messaged you.” “I changed numbers.” “Facebook.” “I stopped using it.” “Email.” Rory pressed the wet receipt with her thumbnail. A small crescent scar on her wrist blanched against the edge of the counter. “I saw the emails.” Nia drank some wine. She set the glass down in the centre of its paper coaster, then turned it until the printed raven faced away from her. “Right.” Silas brought the tea. He placed it beside Rory’s elbow and carried his ledger to a table beneath an old map of the Thames. Neither woman watched him go. “How’s your mum?” Rory asked. “She’s in Penarth now.” “She left the house?” “Last year.” “What happened to the wall?” “Which wall?” “The kitchen. All the pencil marks.” Nia’s hand stopped on the glass stem. “She painted over them before the viewing.” Rory remembered standing with her back against that wall while Nia’s mother held a cereal box level with her head. Nia had insisted that everyone needed a mark, even visitors. Beside Rory’s height, she had written CARTER, FULLY GROWN, DO NOT WATER. “She could have kept that bit.” “The estate agent wanted neutral.” Nia pulled a packet of tissues from her bag and wiped rain from the umbrella handle. She folded the used tissue into a square. “You look the same.” “No, I don’t.” “Your face does.” “That’s worse.” “I didn’t mean—” “I know.” Rory took off the fleece. Her T-shirt caught at the waistband of her jeans, and she tugged it down. She regretted taking the fleece off at all. Nia glanced at the receipts again. “Do you still write?” “Shopping lists.” “You used to fill whole notebooks.” “Most of it was complaints.” “No. There was that piece about the woman who cleaned the lecture theatres.” “Mrs Price.” “You gave her all the best lines.” “She had them.” “You never let me read the ending.” “I didn’t write one.” Nia smiled into her glass. “That sounds like you.” Rory gathered the dry receipts and tapped their edges against the counter. “What was your meeting?” “A client.” “You qualified, then.” “Four years ago.” “I knew you would.” Nia looked at her. “You told me I’d walk out during the first week of the training contract.” “You threatened to.” “I threatened to do a lot of things.” The coat slipped open as she reached for her wine. Beneath it she wore a cream blouse with narrow cuffs. No ink on her fingers. No bitten skin beside her nails. Rory remembered Nia sitting cross-legged on a library table, boots on a stack of property law textbooks, arguing that a house should stop belonging to someone after they left it empty for a year. Rory had taken the books from beneath her boots. She had worried about mud, about fines, about any mark that might attach itself to her name. “What sort of law?” “Property. Some development work.” “Empty houses?” “Among other things.” Nia lifted her chin. “You can ask without doing that.” “Doing what?” “Making it a test.” Rory set the receipts down. “I wasn’t.” “You had the same face in seminars. Just before you asked someone whether they understood their own argument.” “That was usually you.” “Yes.” Nia’s smile held for a moment, then disappeared. “I’m good at it, Rory.” “I didn’t say you weren’t.” “I know what I used to say. I remember all of it. You don’t have to fetch it out.” A taxi stopped beyond the window. Its red tail lights lay across the wet pavement. The passenger stayed inside while the driver got out to open the boot. Rory wrapped both hands around her mug. “My dad would be delighted with you.” “Is he still practising?” “Yes.” “And you?” “I deliver food.” “That wasn’t what I—” “It was a fair question.” Nia ran one finger down the side of her glass, clearing a stripe through the condensation. “I heard you left the course.” “From who?” “Bethan. Years ago.” “I finished the year. I just didn’t come back.” “Because of Evan?” Rory’s tea touched her lip. She lowered it without drinking. Nia looked towards Silas’s table, then back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put it like that.” “How should you have put it?” “I don’t know.” “You always used to know.” “Yes. Well.” Nia reached for her bag, unfastened it, then left her hand inside without taking anything out. “You rang me once. After I moved to Bristol.” Rory looked at the old photograph hanging above the bottles: four men outside a shop, all their hats casting the same dark shape over their eyes. “I don’t remember.” “At half past eleven.” “A lot of people rang you at half past eleven.” “You asked if you could come for the weekend.” Rory remembered the bathroom tile against her bare feet. She remembered lowering her voice because Evan had turned down the television in the next room. “You had something on.” “An assessment. On the Monday.” “It mattered.” “I told you to come the following week.” “Yes.” “You didn’t.” “No.” Nia took her hand out of the bag. “I used to think you were angry because I’d chosen an exam over you.” “Were you?” “What?” “Thinking that. Or hoping that was all it was.” Nia looked down. Her wine had left a pale ring inside the bowl. “I could have asked why you wanted to come.” Rory loosened her grip on the mug. The heat had reddened her palms. “I could have told you.” “You said everything was fine.” “I’d practised.” For a while the only voices came from the table near the door. Two men argued over which station they needed. One kept enlarging a map on his phone; the other pointed down a street the screen did not show. Nia took off her coat. She folded it over the empty stool rather than hanging it up. “I got your Christmas card.” “Which one?” “The one with the robin. You’d drawn glasses on it.” “I sent that to everyone.” “You wrote that you were glad I’d got out.” “I was.” “I read it as a complaint.” Rory looked at her. “I had a job, a room without mould, people who knew what a pension was. I thought you were taking the piss.” “The robin was taking the piss.” Nia gave a short laugh and rubbed beneath one eye with the side of her finger, careful not to disturb the rest of her face. “I kept it for ages.” “I thought you’d thrown it out.” “Why?” “You never answered.” “No.” Rory pulled the ruined receipt away from the others. The ink had spread beyond recovery. “Silas, have you got a pen?” He looked up from his ledger and reached into his jacket. When she went to fetch it, he held it out by the barrel. “Your usual one’s beside the till.” “I know.” She returned to her stool. Nia had taken a clean napkin from the holder and put it where the wet receipt had been. “What do you need to write?” “The amount. Before I forget.” “Seventeen forty.” “You remembered.” “It was an expensive introduction.” Rory wrote the figure at the top of the napkin, then the restaurant’s name. Nia watched her form the letters. “You still do your capital E like that.” “Like what?” “As if it’s got somewhere to sit.” Rory looked down at the long bottom stroke. Nia drew the napkin towards herself. “Can I?” Rory passed her the pen. Nia wrote a number beneath the amount, crossed out one digit, and wrote the whole thing again on a fresh line. “Personal mobile. Not work.” “I’ve still got the old one somewhere.” “That one belonged to the firm.” Rory took the napkin back. Nia’s handwriting had lost its loops, but she still pressed hard enough to leave marks in the paper beneath. Rory traced the indentation with her thumb. “Do you still have the card?” “No.” Nia turned the pen between her fingers. “I threw it out when I moved.” “The robin?” “The whole thing.” Rory nodded and placed the napkin beneath her mug, leaving the number clear of the base. Nia looked at the blank space below it. “I never knew what to write back.” “You could have put that.” “I know that now.” Rory reached for the pen. Nia handed it over, and Rory wrote her number underneath.