AI Rory was halfway down the stairs when she heard someone laugh in the bar, and missed the last step.
She caught the banister before her ankle turned. The laugh had stopped. Below her, glasses touched, a chair scraped, and someone asked Silas for another packet of crisps.
She stood for a moment with her hand on the rail. People laughed like other people all the time. It was one of the less interesting things the world did.
Then the woman at the bar said, “I’m sorry, that was louder than I meant it to be,” and Rory knew her.
Carys Morgan sat on a stool beneath the old map of Europe, a dark coat folded neatly over her knees. Her hair, once a mass of copper curls she had threatened to shave off every summer, was cut close to her head. A thin gold chain lay against the collar of her shirt. She wore a suit jacket, though the sleeves were pushed back, and a watch with a face as plain as a station clock.
Rory had not seen her in six years. She had never seen her sit so still.
Silas noticed Rory first. He was polishing a glass, his silver signet ring flashing under the low light. His eyes moved from her face to Carys and back again, but all he said was, “Evening, Rory.”
Carys turned. For a second she looked politely attentive, as if Rory were someone approaching to ask for the stool beside her. Then her mouth opened.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Hello, Caz.”
Carys slid off the stool so abruptly that her coat slipped to the floor. She bent to retrieve it, hit her head lightly against the bar and swore. Rory felt the old, immediate urge to laugh, followed by the equally old urge to make sure she was all right.
“I’m fine,” Carys said, rubbing her temple . “That’s about right, isn’t it?”
“You always were graceful.”
“Yes, well. I’ve had training since then.”
The suit made the joke harder to read. Rory kept her hands in her coat pockets. She had come down intending to get milk from the shop on the corner. Upstairs, a pan of rice was cooling on the stove, and she had left the flat door pulled to but not locked.
Carys looked at her black work trousers and the restaurant’s red logo on her jacket. “Do you work here?”
“No. I live upstairs.”
“Above a bar?”
“It seemed sensible at the time.”
Silas set the glass on the shelf. “Still does, I hope.”
“Most nights,” Rory said.
Carys gave him a quick, uncertain smile. “I didn’t know. I just came in because it was raining.”
Rory glanced toward the front window. Rain slid down the glass, blurring the green neon outside into a tremulous smear. She had been listening to it against her bedroom window for the past half-hour.
“What are you doing in London?” she asked.
“Work. Well, work until about four. Now I’m waiting for a train.”
“Back to Cardiff?”
“Bristol. I live there now.”
Rory nodded, as if this were a fact she had merely forgotten. Bristol was near enough to Cardiff for visits and far enough to make them deliberate.
Silas looked at her. “Tea?”
She almost said she was going out. Then Carys moved her coat onto the next stool, leaving the one on her other side empty, and Rory said, “Please.”
Silas filled the kettle. He did not ask Carys whether she wanted another drink. Her glass was still nearly full.
Rory sat. Up close she could see a pale line through one of Carys’s eyebrows, a scar she didn’t recognise. There were shadows under her eyes, and the skin around her nails was bitten raw. Rory remembered her at nineteen, declaring that she would never work in an office, that she would live on a boat and teach children to paint. Carys had been unable to swim and had hated children in groups, but she had defended the plan for an entire evening.
“So,” Rory said, looking at the jacket. “The boat?”
Carys glanced down. “Sold it for the watch .”
“That must be some watch .”
“It tells the time and everything.”
The kettle clicked. Silas brought Rory a mug and placed a small jug of milk beside it. As he turned away, his left leg caught slightly , the familiar hitch in his stride. He went to serve a couple at the far end of the bar.
Carys watched him. “He knows how you take your tea.”
“He ought to. I’ve been paying him rent long enough.”
“You live here alone?”
The question landed more heavily than Carys could have intended. Or perhaps she had intended it.
“Yes,” Rory said.
“Good.” Carys took a breath. “I mean, if you want to.”
“I do.”
Carys wrapped both hands around her glass. There was no ring on either of them. Rory disliked herself a little for looking.
“I’m a solicitor,” Carys said.
Rory turned to her. “You’re joking.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“You once told my father his profession depended on people having miserable lives.”
“I was seventeen.”
“You were twenty.”
“Oh.” Carys considered it. “Well, I’ve refined the argument.”
Rory remembered that dinner : her father amused at first, then less amused; her mother carrying potatoes around the table twice because nobody had noticed them the first time. Carys had stood her ground, red-faced and glorious, while Rory kicked her under the table and tried not to smile. Afterwards they had walked to the bus stop in the cold, Carys triumphant, Rory embarrassed by how much she had enjoyed it.
“What kind of solicitor?” Rory asked.
“Housing. Mostly possession cases, homelessness appeals. Some legal aid, when we can get it.”
“That sounds difficult.”
“It can be.” Carys picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I like it.”
The answer seemed to surprise her a little, though she didn’t take it back.
“What happened to painting?”
“I still do it.”
“On the boat?”
“In the kitchen. Badly.”
“I never said you were good.”
“You did, actually. You said that portrait I did of you was very sensitive.”
“It made me look like a potato.”
“A sensitive potato.”
Rory smiled before she could stop herself. Carys saw it and smiled too, then lowered her eyes to her drink.
The smile faded from Rory’s face. She poured milk into her tea, watching it curl through the brown.
She had sent Carys a message three years ago, from a borrowed phone in a kitchen in London. Eva had been asleep in the next room. Rory had sat at the table with the curtains drawn and typed out the words slowly , deleting anything that sounded too frightened.
I’ve left Evan. Please don’t tell him where I am.
Carys had replied almost at once. Thank God. Are you safe?
Rory had said yes. She had told her she was in London, staying with Eva, and asked her not to tell anyone yet. Carys had promised.
Two days later, Evan had called Eva’s number. He had been calm at first, asking to speak to Rory, saying he only wanted to know she was all right. Then Eva had told him to stop calling, and he had stopped being calm. Rory could still remember Eva holding the phone away from her ear.
Carys had sent seven messages after that. Rory had read the first two and deleted the rest without opening them.
“I saw your mother last year,” Carys said.
Rory looked up sharply .
“In Cardiff. Outside the library. She told me you were well.” Carys’s fingers tightened on the glass. “I didn’t ask where you were.”
Rory waited.
“I wanted to say something to her, but I thought she might not know. About what I’d done.”
“She knows.”
Carys nodded once. “Right.”
The couple at the far end of the bar laughed at something. One of them had spread a damp newspaper across the counter, and Silas was moving a bowl of peanuts out of its reach. Ordinary life continued with a thoroughness Rory found irritating.
“He said he was worried about you,” Carys said quietly. “When he called me.”
“I know what he said.”
“He said he thought you’d hurt yourself. He said you’d been saying things.” Carys rubbed her thumb against the side of her glass. “I believed him.”
“You believed him after I asked you not to tell him.”
“I know.”
Rory had imagined this conversation often enough to have prepared better lines. On buses, in the shower, lying awake in the flat upstairs, she had told Carys precisely what it had cost to hear Eva’s phone ring. How the kitchen had seemed to shrink around her. How she had wanted to leave again, before she had even unpacked.
Now Carys was here, with her bitten nails and her neat jacket, and Rory could only say, “You knew what he was like.”
“Yes.”
“You saw him take my phone off me at your birthday.”
“I thought he was being a prick.”
“He was being a prick.”
“I didn’t understand how bad it was.”
Rory looked down at her wrist. Her sleeve had ridden up, exposing the small crescent scar there. She pulled the cuff over it. The scar had nothing to do with Evan, but he had once held her by that wrist hard enough to leave marks around it. For a long time afterwards she had worn a watch she didn’t need.
“I didn’t understand either,” she said. “Not for a while.”
Carys’s face changed, some small release of tension . Rory saw it and felt suddenly angry.
“That doesn’t make it all right.”
“No.” Carys put the glass down. “No, it doesn’t.”
Rain ticked against the window. Someone opened the door and brought in a gust of wet air. Rory smelled traffic and cold stone.
“I’m sorry,” Carys said. “I was sorry as soon as I’d done it. I rang him back and told him I’d been wrong, and he said I’d done the decent thing.” Her mouth twisted. “I think I wanted you to answer me so I could tell you I’d tried to put it right.”
“You couldn’t put it right.”
“I know that now.”
Rory stirred her tea, though the milk had already mixed in. The spoon tapped the side of the mug.
Carys said, “I should have trusted you.”
It was the sentence Rory had wanted three years ago. It did not arrive with any sense of completion. Her tea had gone lukewarm. Carys’s train would leave whether or not Rory forgave her.
At nineteen they had shared a narrow bed after a party because neither of them had money for a taxi. Carys had talked until dawn about a girl she loved, turning every glance and half-sentence over for Rory’s inspection. In the morning they had found a whole pizza under the bed, still in its box. Rory could remember the smell of cold cheese, the pressure of Carys’s shoulder against hers, the absolute certainty that there would always be time to finish the conversation.
“You cut your hair,” she said.
Carys touched it. “Last spring.”
“I thought you loved it long.”
“I did. Then I didn’t.”
“Is it that simple?”
“Not usually.” Carys hesitated. “Mum got ill. I spent a lot of time going back and forth, and one morning I couldn’t face washing it. So I cut it off with the kitchen scissors.”
“How is she?”
“She died in October.”
Rory’s hand stopped on the spoon. She remembered Carys’s mother at the door in her dressing gown, giving them both money for chips and pretending not to know they had been drinking.
“I’m sorry,” Rory said.
Carys nodded. “She’d been ill for a while.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Why would you?”
There was no accusation in it, which made Rory feel worse. She had not looked Carys up. She had made a point of not looking, as if curiosity might weaken a boundary she had needed. Still, there had been a funeral, and all the days before it, and Carys had got through them without her.
“She used to put vinegar on everything,” Rory said.
Carys gave a startled laugh. “Even roast potatoes.”
“Especially roast potatoes.”
“She’d have been pleased you remembered.”
“I remember your house smelled of it.”
“And wet dog.”
“You didn’t have a dog.”
“We had the dog from next door. He spent more time with us than they did.”
Rory remembered him then: a fat black spaniel who had slept with his chin on Carys’s shoe. She remembered the lino in the kitchen, lifting at one corner, and a crack in the back door that let in a blade of winter air. The house came back so clearly that she could almost step into it, though she had no idea who lived there now.
Carys checked her watch and made a small noise. “I should go.”
“Already?”
“My train’s at eight twenty.”
Rory looked toward the window. The rain had eased to a fine mist. She could see her own reflection beside the green light, her dark hair tucked behind one ear.
Carys pulled on her coat. “It was good to see you,” she said, and then, with an awkwardness Rory recognised, “I know that may not be how you feel .”
“I don’t know how I feel .”
“That’s fair.”
Silas returned to collect an empty glass. Carys reached for her purse, but he shook his head.
“You paid when you ordered,” he said.
“Of course.” She gave a short laugh. “Sorry.”
She stood with her hand on the back of the stool. Rory could let her leave. There was milk to buy and rice upstairs, and in the morning she had deliveries to make. She could go back to her life as it had been an hour ago, except that Carys’s mother would be dead in it, and Carys would be in Bristol, painting in her kitchen.
“I’ll walk you to the corner,” Rory said.
Carys looked at her, then nodded. She did not reach for her.
Outside, the pavement shone under the streetlights. A bus passed at the end of the road, throwing a fan of water against the kerb. Rory walked beside Carys beneath the green glow of the sign. They had once matched their strides without thinking; now they adjusted twice, both stepping aside at once to make room for a man with an umbrella.
At the corner Carys stopped. “I can find the station from here.”
“I’m sure you can.”
Another pause. Carys put her hand in her pocket and took out a business card. She looked at it, seemed to think better of it, and put it away again.
“I’ve still got the same number,” she said.
Rory had deleted it, but that was not difficult to remedy. She took out her phone and handed it over. Carys entered the number carefully , then passed it back.
“I might not call,” Rory said.
“I know.”
Rory put the phone in her pocket. Carys shifted her bag higher on her shoulder and started toward the station. At the crossing she turned and raised a hand. Rory raised hers in return, then watched until the crowd carried Carys out of sight.
The shop was still open. Rory bought the milk and carried it back through the damp streets, the cold plastic handle pressing into her fingers. Above the entrance to the Nest, the green sign hummed. She stood beneath it for a moment before going in, thinking of a kitchen she had not seen in years and a woman who had once fed her chips with too much vinegar.