AI Rory had one hand on the till when she saw Nia Morgan in the mirror behind the bar.
For a moment she thought she was looking at someone who merely knew how to stand like her. The woman at the far end of the room had Nia’s long neck and the same habit of holding a glass by its stem, two fingers balanced lightly against the base. But Nia’s hair had always been a wild dark cloud, full of pencils and once, during a particularly bad week at school, a piece of chewing gum. This woman’s hair was cut close to her head. She wore a charcoal suit and a white shirt buttoned neatly at the throat.
She was listening to a man talk. She smiled at something he said, a small, courteous movement that seemed to cost her nothing .
Rory shut the till harder than she meant to.
Silas glanced up from polishing a glass. “Everything all right?”
“Yes.” Rory kept her eyes on the mirror. “I think I know someone.”
“Dangerous?”
“No.”
Silas followed her gaze. His silver signet ring caught the light as he set the glass down. “Then I’ll leave you to it.”
He moved along the bar with his slight, familiar limp, and Rory stood with the receipt still in her hand. Six years. She had seen Nia in photographs since then, in the occasional small square on her phone, but photographs had never prepared her for the physical fact of her: the reach of her arm as she put down her glass, the quick tilt of her head.
The man beside Nia checked his watch . He said something to the other two people with them, and they gathered coats and bags. Nia reached for her own coat, then looked towards the bar.
Her eyes passed over Rory. Came back.
Rory lifted a hand.
Nia stared at her. Then she said something to her companions, and the man turned to look. Rory felt an absurd urge to duck behind the till. Instead she watched Nia hand over her coat and walk across the room.
“Rory Carter,” Nia said.
Her voice was lower than Rory remembered, though the Cardiff was still there.
“Hello, Nia.”
They looked at each other. Nia’s eyes moved over Rory’s face, her black hair, the apron she had borrowed from Silas.
“I thought you were in London,” Nia said.
“I am.”
“Yes. Apparently.”
Rory laughed, and Nia did too. The sound gave Rory a brief, painful sense that everything might be easy after all.
Behind Nia, the others were waiting . One of them called her name.
“I’ll get the Tube,” Nia called back. “See you tomorrow.”
The man raised a hand. A moment later the door opened, letting in a wash of cold air and green neon. Then they were gone .
“You didn’t have to stay,” Rory said.
“I know.” Nia looked at the stool in front of her. “Can I?”
“Of course.”
Rory came round from behind the bar. She had only meant to help Silas for half an hour while one of his staff dealt with a broken lock at home. Now she untied the apron and folded it on the counter. Silas, serving a couple beneath the old maps on the opposite wall, gave her a glance that said he had already noticed.
They took a table near a black-and-white photograph of a Soho street. Nia put her phone face down between them.
“I nearly walked straight past you,” she said.
“You did walk straight past me.”
“I mean on my way out.”
“I know what you meant.”
Nia’s mouth twitched. “You still do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make people account for themselves.”
Rory thought of her father at the dinner table, asking for the source of every claim she made, however small. “Occupational hazard.”
“What’s your occupation?”
“Several things badly.” Rory pulled out the chair opposite her. “At the moment, I deliver for a Chinese restaurant.”
“In London?”
“No, I commute to Cardiff for every order.”
Nia laughed properly then, and Rory felt the old pleasure of it. At school she had measured the success of a day partly by whether she could make Nia laugh in assembly without either of them getting caught.
“What about you?” Rory asked.
“I’m a solicitor. Council housing team.”
“Your lot looked very official.”
“They are. We’d been at a conference. Someone suggested a drink, and someone else insisted this place was worth finding.”
“It is.”
“You come here often?”
“I live upstairs.”
Nia looked towards the ceiling, as if she might see through it. “You live above a bar?”
“It sounds more exciting than it is.”
“I don’t know. I spent most of last night trying to get my washing machine to drain.”
“Mine makes a noise like a helicopter landing. Maybe they could meet.”
Nia smiled, but her attention had settled on Rory’s hands. Rory tucked them under the table. She had always been able to tell when Nia was deciding whether to ask a difficult question; she used to press her thumb into the soft place beneath her lower lip. She didn’t do that now. She sat very still.
“You left Cardiff,” Nia said.
“I did.”
“When?”
“Nearly two years ago.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
Rory looked towards the bar. Silas was talking to the couple, one hand resting on the counter. Somewhere behind him, ice dropped into a glass.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
Nia nodded once. It was a gesture Rory didn’t recognise.
“I heard about your mother,” Rory said.
The words had been waiting between them since Nia crossed the room. Rory had hoped, stupidly, that they might sit there a little longer.
Nia’s face changed, not much, but enough . “I know you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You sent flowers.”
Rory remembered standing in a supermarket aisle, choosing them from a photograph on her phone. White lilies, because she had read somewhere that they were appropriate. She had never liked lilies, and she could not remember whether Nia’s mother had.
“I should have called.”
“Yes,” Nia said.
Rory let the answer stand. She had rehearsed others in the years since: that she had been frightened , that Evan had read her messages, that by the time she found a moment alone she no longer knew how to begin. All of it was true. None of it altered the fact that Nia had called her, and Rory had listened to the message and put the phone away.
“I kept meaning to,” she said.
Nia picked up her glass. There was only a mouthful left, and she drank it. “I waited for you at the funeral.”
Rory’s fingers tightened against each other beneath the table.
“I thought you might turn up at the last minute. You were always late.” Nia set the glass down carefully . “Mam used to say you’d be late to your own hanging and the crowd would go home disappointed.”
Rory remembered the little kitchen in Nia’s house, the yellowed calendar and the radio balanced on the windowsill. Mrs Morgan giving her the burnt edge of the toast because Rory liked it, pretending she had made the mistake on purpose.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again .
Nia looked away. “She asked after you, you know. Even when you stopped coming round.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No.”
A burst of laughter came from the bar. Rory had the strange feeling that she should get up and ask them to be quiet, though the people laughing had no reason to know what was happening at this table.
“Was it cancer?” she asked.
Nia nodded. “She was ill for a long time. Then suddenly she wasn’t ill for very long at all.”
Rory imagined Nia through those months: hospital chairs, forms, cups of tea left to go cold. She tried to fit the woman in the suit into the picture and couldn’t. The Nia she kept finding was seventeen, standing in the school corridor with her blazer unbuttoned, telling a boy twice her size exactly what she thought of him.
“You used to hate people like those you came in with,” Rory said before she could stop herself.
Nia’s eyebrows rose. “People in suits?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did.”
Rory looked at the white shirt, the clean lines of the jacket. “You know what I mean.”
“Not really .”
“At school you wanted to bring everything down. You told Mr Pritchard his tie was a symbol of state oppression .”
“He’d given me detention for having my shirt untucked.”
“You called him a fascist.”
“He was a geography teacher.”
Rory smiled. Nia did not.
“I remember,” Nia said. “I was there.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just strange.”
“What is?”
“Seeing you like this.”
Nia glanced down at herself. “I had an interview. I bought a suit. They offered me a job. It wasn’t a single catastrophic event.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. You mean I’ve sold out.”
Rory opened her mouth, then closed it. She had thought something close to it when Nia said council housing. She had pictured Nia in a meeting room, explaining to someone why they couldn’t stay in their home.
Nia saw the hesitation. “Most days I’m trying to stop the council getting sued because somebody hasn’t followed its own policy. Sometimes that means a family gets moved somewhere with a working boiler. Sometimes it means I have to explain why there isn’t a house for them.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It can be.”
“Do you like it?”
Nia considered. “I like knowing how things work. I like that occasionally I can make them work a little better.” She rubbed a thumb along the edge of the table. “And I like being paid. Mam was on statutory sick pay for months. I don’t think I realised until then how much it costs to be poor.”
Rory thought of the old Morgan house: the damp patch over the stairs, the electric heater they carried from room to room. She had spent half her childhood there without ever wondering how the bills were paid .
“I’m glad you’ve got a job you like,” she said.
“Bits of it.”
“Bits of it, then.”
Silas appeared beside the table. “Can I get either of you anything?”
Nia looked at her empty glass. “Another of the same, please.”
“Rory?”
“Tea, if there’s any going.”
“There is now.”
When he had gone, Nia watched him behind the bar. “He seems nice.”
“He is.”
“Is he your landlord?”
“And my friend.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“Sometimes.” Rory smiled. “He makes decent tea, though.”
Nia leaned back. “Your mother told mine you were studying law.”
“Pre-Law. I left.”
“Did you hate it?”
“I was good at parts of it.” Rory thought of her father’s pleasure when she had enrolled, how carefully he had tried not to show it. “That made it harder to admit I didn’t want it.”
Nia nodded. She didn’t say that Rory had always been clever, or that she could go back, or any of the other things people offered when they wanted to make the subject less uncomfortable. Rory was grateful .
“I’m glad you got out,” Nia said.
“Out of university?”
“Cardiff. Evan. Whatever it was.” She paused. “I knew something was wrong.”
Rory studied the damp ring Nia’s glass had left on the table. “You asked me.”
“Once.”
“More than once.”
“I stopped asking.”
“You had other things going on.”
“Don’t do that.” Nia’s voice was quiet. “Don’t make me sound kinder than I was. I was angry with you.”
“You had every right.”
“I came round one afternoon. He answered the door and said you were sleeping.”
Rory remembered. Evan had told her afterwards that Nia had been rude, that she had looked at him as if he were something on her shoe. Rory had defended Nia, and the afternoon had gone badly.
“I thought he was lying,” Nia said. “I went home anyway.”
Rory looked up. “If you’d made a fuss, he would have taken it out on me.”
Nia’s face tightened. “Did he?”
“Not because of you.” Rory pulled back her sleeve, then let it fall over the small crescent scar on her wrist. She had caught it on the table edge and felt the old, smooth skin. “You couldn’t have known what to do. I was there and I didn’t know.”
Silas brought their drinks. Nia thanked him, and he put a small jug of milk beside Rory’s tea before returning to the bar.
For a while they sat without speaking. Nia took off her jacket and hung it over the back of her chair. There was a faint crease across one shoulder where a bag strap had rested. Rory remembered her school blazer, perpetually shedding buttons. She remembered sewing one back on with dental floss in the back row of a maths lesson, Nia hunched in front of her and laughing silently.
“I still have your book,” Nia said.
“Which book?”
“The one you lent me before exams. The poems.”
“I had a book of poems?”
“You carried it everywhere for about a month. You said it made you look interesting.”
“That does sound like me.”
“There’s a crisp packet in it you were using as a bookmark.”
“Keep it. It’ll be worth something now.”
Nia smiled into her drink. “I thought about posting it to you.”
“You didn’t know where I was.”
“I could have asked your mother.”
Rory wrapped her hands around the mug. “You could have.”
Neither of them reached for an explanation. Beyond the window, people moved in and out of the green light above the entrance. A bus passed at the end of the street, its windows briefly bright between the buildings.
Nia picked up her phone and turned it over. “I should get home.”
Rory felt the familiar urge to make a joke, to send her away laughing. Instead she said, “Could I see you again?”
Nia looked at her for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“All right.”
“I’d like to think about it.”
Rory nodded. She found a pen at the bar and wrote her number on the back of an old receipt. When she returned, Nia had put on her jacket.
“It hasn’t changed,” Rory said, handing her the receipt. “But you might have deleted it.”
“I did.”
“Fair enough.”
Nia folded the receipt and put it in her pocket. They stood awkwardly beside the table until Rory stepped forward and put her arms around her. Nia hesitated, then held her back. Her jacket was cool from the room, and beneath it her shoulder felt narrower than Rory expected.
At the door Nia turned. “Mam liked daffodils, by the way.”
Rory felt the rebuke in it, and something else too: a fact offered late, but offered.
“I’ll remember,” she said.
Nia gave her a small nod and went out beneath the green sign. Rory watched through the window as she joined the people on the pavement, her close-cropped head visible for a few seconds before the crowd took her from sight.
When Rory returned to the table, Nia’s empty glass stood beside her own cup. She picked them both up and carried them to the bar. Silas took the glass from her, but she kept the tea. It was still warm enough to drink.