AI The green neon above the door buzzed softly , a steady insect hum in the winter air. Rory had always liked that sound , the way it cut through Soho’s exhaust-slick chaos and gave the place a quiet pulse of its own. She shouldered the door open with an elbow, paper bag of bao buns tucked in her arm, and let the warm, amber light swallow her.
The familiar drift of malt, citrus oil, the iron tang that lived in old pipes—all of it sat under the walls’ collage of maps and photographs: polar routes spiraling toward white margins, sailors with pipes gazing out from another century, nameless cities mid-bombardment caught in stark black and white. The Raven’s Nest made a habit of memorialising journeys that had gone wrong.
Silas was behind the bar, as he always was at this hour, neat beard, shirt sleeves rolled, the silver signet ring gleaming when he polished a glass. He moved with that Severn Tide slowness born of an old injury. She clocked the faint hitch in his left leg as he stepped back from the till to give some theatre to a Manhattan. He’d adjusted to his limp the way the bar had adjusted to its shadows.
“Payday feast,” Rory said, hefting the bag like an offering.
“Bribe accepted,” Silas said, voice low, rhythmic, a voice that could sell you either a confession or a whisky. He set the cloth aside, offered a faint, private smile that wrinkled the corners of his hazel eyes. “You’ve done your miles.”
“My thighs agree.”
“You’ll live, Carter.” He tapped the bag. “Yu-Fei is spoiling me.”
“She says you over-tipped last week.”
“She brews tea that could resurrect a bishop.” He slid a cup and saucer towards Rory before she could ask, steam ribboning up, the smell of oolong like warmed hay.
She took her usual stool at the end of the bar, back where the bookshelf still had that one title with a cracked spine that happened to open a door. She’d learned without asking never to lean on it. Silas didn’t look at the shelf, but his body arranged itself so he could see it without seeing it.
Outside, someone laughed too loudly, the city’s manic backbeat leaking under the door. Inside, the bar breathed. Two students in oxblood boots argued softly over a map of Africa—one of Silas’s regulars had claimed it as a conversation piece and never moved on. A couple in their forties worked through a charcuterie board with the careful domestic choreography of people who still liked each other. In the far corner, a man traced the grain of the table with his fingertip and stared into a whisky that was either an old friend or an accusation.
The door chimed. The winter air reached lazy fingers in. Rory didn’t look at first; she was untying the bag and setting bao onto a plate, mind already leaving this day and the next and going nowhere at all.
Then she heard a voice ask, “Sorry, do you do soda and lime?”—and every nerve in her went bright with recognition before her mind was ready to put a name to it.
She turned. The woman at the bar was half a head taller than Rory remembered, or perhaps it was the posture. Hair that had once been a sunburnt tumble down to shoulder blades was clipped close to her skull in a crown of practical curls. The soft clothes of late adolescence—the paint-streaked hoodies, the too-long scarves—had been traded for a dark coat with reflective strips and a logo on the shoulder Rory couldn’t quite read from this angle. The woman’s face was the same blueprint held under different glass: the delicate slope of nose, the high cheekbones, the faint constellation of freckles across the bridge. But the softness had been sketched over with lines Rory didn’t know. She wore them like someone who’d had to.
“Carys?” It came out like a question to a ghost.
The woman’s eyes cut to her. For a second they were both nineteen again—cheeks cold from Penarth pier wind, a shared polystyrene cup of chips burning their fingers, laughter knitting them together in loops that had felt permanent.
“Rory?” Carys said, and then, because she couldn’t help it, there was the old grin, sudden and shameless, the light it put in her eyes outshining every thing else she’d collected since. “God. Is it you?”
Rory slid off the stool before she knew she’d moved, mouth already grinning too. They had the awkward, endearingly ugly hug of people who don’t know if they’re allowed to be as glad as they feel .
“You said soda and lime?” Silas asked from the safe distance of understatement, his ring ticking against the soda gun.
Carys released Rory and looked up, a flush on her cheeks now that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Please. And—actually—might I steal a minute? I’ve just come off a twelve.”
“Twelve?” Rory said, bewildered, taking in the reflective strips proper now, the faint scuff of hospital grit on the boots.
“Paramedic.” Carys’s hand moved half toward the logo on her sleeve and fell back, as if she didn’t like to make that kind of point of it. “South Central.”
Of course. The hair, the jacket, the posture that screamed I-lift-people-for-a-living. The old pens in Carys’s pockets had been replaced by shears, a torch, a penlight. The changes rearranged themselves into something that made shame curl at the base of Rory’s throat, the not-knowing of five entire years she’d let happen to someone who once sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor translating Dylan Thomas aloud in a voice that used to crack on the o.
“Bloody hell, Caz,” Rory said, using the nickname she hadn’t used with her mouth in years, only in the privacy of bitter conversations with herself. “Look at you.”
“Don’t,” Carys said, rolling her eyes, but it was fond. “I look a fright. Don’t know why I thought I could get away with popping in. I can smell the ambulance on me.”
“You smell like...work,” Rory said. “Which is an upgrade. You used to smell like turpentine and Doritos.”
“Deadly combination.” Carys took the soda and lime with a soft thanks and then, as if bracing herself, glanced around the room. “Is this yours?”
“God, no.” Rory nodded towards Silas, who inclined his head with the ghost of a smile that made strangers talk. “I rent the flat upstairs sometimes when the boiler’s behaving. I run deliveries for the Golden Empress down the road. And I”—she lifted her cup—“am an oolong connoisseur.”
“Fancy.”
“Shi-fancy,” Silas said dryly.
Carys laughed at that, the same quick upward bubble Rory remembered from inside jokes at the back of Economics. “Hi. I’m Carys.”
“Silas,” he said, and his hand enveloped hers, warm and dry, the ring cool. He had a way of saying his name that made you feel like you’d always known it.
They posted up at Rory’s end of the bar. Carys wrapped both hands around her glass as though she needed something to do with them.
“How long?” Carys asked, which could have been how long have you been here, how long have you been gone , how long did it take you to learn to breathe in a new city.
“London? Five years.”
“And here?”
“A while. Months. Time’s fuzzy.”
Carys drank, winced at the lime like she always had, subtle transformations be damned. “I thought—well. I didn’t know where you went.” She managed not to make it a complaint. It sat between them anyway.
“I didn’t tell anybody.” Rory kept her voice even. The oolong loosened a tightness under her ribs. “It was that or I wouldn’t go. Eva called me one night and told me not to be an idiot.”
“Eva always did have a better mouth than sense,” Carys said, and there was love in it. “She texted me once, said you were okay, wouldn’t say more.”
Rory exhaled through her nose. “She was one of the few people I let in on the geography.”
“I know.” Carys’s eyes flicked , quick as a sparrow, to Rory’s left wrist where the sleeve of her jacket had hitched. The small crescent of scar there was as much a part of Rory’s body as her knuckles, a long-ago bike crash turned white against her skin. Carys’s gaze snagged on it and softened for reasons that had nothing to do with that old summer. “And Evan?” she asked carefully , the name placed like something you didn’t want to break.
Rory’s spine went electric anyway. The memory of a door slamming, of a voice that oiled its way into your orbit, of managing the tempo of her life in half-steps to avoid triggering a universe she’d once mistaken for love. The tiny scar looked suddenly like a lighthouse.
“He’s not in my life,” she said, and it came out more like iron than she intended.
Carys nodded once, solemn, relief slipping over her features like rain running off a window. “Good.”
Rory studied her. The new lines at the corners of Carys’s mouth were the ones you got from compressing your lips in concentration. Her hands, steady around the glass, bore faint, pale indentations where gloves lived most of their days. She looked like a person who’d learned how to walk into other people’s disasters and come out unshaken, but the tiredness in the set of her shoulders told another truth: you never come out unshaken, you just wear better armour.
“You used to hate the sight of blood,” Rory said softly , remembering a sixth-form first aid class, Carys going green halfway through a wound-dressing demonstration and hiding her face in Rory’s shoulder while muttering apologies.
“I still do,” Carys said. “But it turns out people bleed whether I like it or not.”
“So you... what, what made you...?”
“My dad had the stroke.” She said it in a voice with two tempos, the delivery clipped, the interior still. “Three years back. We waited for the ambulance that wasn’t fast enough. He’s okay now, relative to what it could be. But—I thought—there’s a thing you can do that isn’t drawing pictures of rivers that looked like veins. And every one in the queue at Sainsbury's claps you when you’re in uniform but won’t move aside when you need to get an old man to a lift, so actually it’s”—she smiled briefly, tiredly—“not noble at all. It’s mostly telling people to stop filming.”
Rory breathed out, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “God. Caz.”
“What about you?” Carys said, sharp pivot, because she could always sense when Rory was folding herself too small. “Pre-Law to...?”
“Battered scooters and bao runs.” She made a shrug of it. “It’s not glamorous. But the city thinks I’m invisible, which is...not unwelcome. And I can outrun a lot of things on two wheels.”
“Your mother will be thrilled,” Carys said, teasing masking a small worried frown.
“She gives me recipes and articles on pedestrian rights.” Rory rubbed a thumb along the rim of her saucer. “My dad’s still trying to get me to read case law in my spare time.”
“Do you?” Carys cocked a brow.
“Sometimes.” She swallowed , thinking of bedtime in Cardiff, Brendan Carter’s voice pacing the living room as he rehearsed arguments, the sound making its way through floorboards to wrap around Rory like a story that ended with its own certainty. Jennifer sitting on the sofa mending a hem, murmuring at him to breathe. “I like knowing there’s a proper way to argue. I don’t like what it argued me out of.”
Silas drifted away to talk to the couple with the charcuterie. The nest of lights above the bar mirrored in the polished wood, a soft galaxy Rory could orbit when a conversation rolled heavy.
“That night at The Flora,” Carys began, and stopped. The Flora had been their local; the night in question had ended with Evan’s knuckles through a bathroom door. “I should’ve—”
“Don’t.” Rory’s mouth moved quicker than her judgment. She saw Carys wince and forced her own breath to slow. “Sorry. I mean, don’t take that onto you. I had two working legs and a brain that knew better.”
“I saw the look on your face,” Carys said, almost to the glass. “And I told myself it wasn’t what it looked like. Because he’d bought me a cider once when I was short. Because it’s awkward to make a fuss when you’re twenty. Because I didn’t want to be the one who made you hate me.”
Rory found her lip between her teeth. The maps on the wall seemed to shift minutely, borders slurring under their own ink. “I didn’t need rescuing. Until I did.”
“And by then you were gone,” Carys said. “Not just from him. From us.”
Rory swallowed the heat in her throat. Behind Carys’s right shoulder was a photograph of two men in overcoats on a bridge, their faces turned away from the lens, the world behind them blur. “I thought if I didn’t slice every thing, it would bleed all into each other. Work, him, my mother’s questions, your kindness. It was...I felt like one touch would pull the whole blanket apart.”
“Eva said as much,” Carys murmured without malice.
“Of course she did.” Rory tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t quite obey. “She’s better at words for me than I am.”
“She always was.” Carys traced a finger through a bead of condensation on her glass and then flicked it away. “Do you hate Cardiff now?”
“I miss the idea of it.” Rory shrugged. “I miss the library and the way St. Mary Street smells like chips and wet wool. I don’t miss being twenty with a boy who had my postcode memorised.”
Carys looked up, a new kind of smile there. Signed with—what—admiration? Relief? “You talk about it without… flinching.”
“I’m good at talking.” Rory met her eye square. “I just wasn’t—then.”
They let the pause sit, warm now, something living in it rather than the brittle wing-edges of earlier.
“What about you?” Rory asked. “Are you—someone?”
Carys barked a laugh. “No. I dress like a highlighter and work through the night. I’m terrible company. My mum thinks the cat was a cry for help.”
“You have a cat?”
“Mitchell. He hates every one and worships my socks.”
“That seems right.”
“And you?” Carys said, that quick, protective pivot again, and Rory wanted to hug her for it and also tell her to stop saving things that didn’t ask to be saved.
“No cats. No people. I have Silas and dumplings and a scooter held together by willpower.”
Silas, sensing his name in the air, looked over from the far end, one brow living its own life. “Hate to break it to you, Carter, but you don’t own my dumplings.”
“She does,” Carys said. “Emotionally.”
Something in Silas’s face gentled. He took their empties when they appeared, replaced them without asking. He had a way of giving you things that felt like your own idea.
“I kept the sketchbook,” Rory blurted, the thought too long in her chest and too raw to tidy. “The one you gave me when we—when we did that stupid road trip to Hay and bought secondhand paperbacks we never read. The one with the blue elastic. I use it for lists now. Deliveries, what I spent, what I need. It felt—less scary. To write my life like a receipt.”
Carys’s hands stilled around her glass. Her eyes went distant, then warmed. “You hated that cover .”
“I still do.” Rory smiled, small and true. “It makes me think of you when I hate it.”
Carys took that in, rolled it like a stone in her mouth. “I thought—after you left—that you threw me out with him.”
“I nearly did.” Rory put her fingers flat to the curve of her cup, the heat bleeding up into her skin. “I thought love had rules like law. That if something touched something bad, it was contaminated. It took me too long to understand that I get to keep the bits that didn’t cut me.”
Carys studied her face with a concentration that would have embarrassed Rory when she was younger. Now she let it happen. “You did always take longer to forgive yourself than anybody.”
“Do you?” Rory asked.
“Forgive me?” Carys’s mouth tipped. “Depends who’s asking. You? Always.”
Something loosened behind Rory’s eyes. She blinked at the maps until they went back to being maps.
The students had left. The man with the whisky had ordered a second and stopped tracing the wood. Street noise was drifting inward, late-night kettles clicking on in flats above, buses labouring. In the mirror behind the bar, Rory saw the two of them framed by bottles, two versions of themselves separated by glass and labels, one that had ducked before a blow, one that walked into them for a living.
“You should come by the station sometime,” Carys said suddenly . It sounded like a dare and an apology. “We’ve got a kettle that only boils if you swear at it. Mitchell’s picture is on the noticeboard because every one’s obsessed with cat videos. It’s—it’s my world, I suppose. You could see it once. If you wanted.”
Rory imagined herself under those fluorescent lights, imagined metal, bleach, the too-clean smell of necessary places. She imagined Carys moving through it like herself, laughing at something on a colleague’s phone, hair curl-sprung after rain. The image made the place feel less like a threat and more like a fact, like a city street at noon.
“I’d like to,” she said. “And you—if you want dumplings, and the oolong that could resurrect a bishop.”
“Done.” Carys looked almost shy, rare currency for her now. “We can talk about the Hay books we didn’t read.”
“And the motorway services we judged.”
“And the boy at the campsite who tried to sing us Ed Sheeran at midnight.”
“Christ.” Rory laughed, honest-to-god laughed, and Silas glanced up, pleased with himself as if he’d been the author of the joke.
They sipped in silence for a minute, letting the new shape of them settle. It was strange to realise that someone could change completely and still be themselves in the ways that mattered to you. Stranger to realise the reverse might also be true, and kind.
“Rory,” Carys said, the name careful, a piece of cut crystal placed back on a shelf. “If there’s something you want to say to me that you didn’t say when you left, you can say it. Now. Or not. I’ll take it either way.”
Rory put her hand palm-down on the bar the way her mother did when she decided not to speak. She watched condensation bead and fall along the side of Carys’s glass, time in small, clear segments.
“You didn’t make me leave,” she said. “And I didn’t leave you because I didn’t love you. I left because I forgot how to love me. The two aren’t tidy. That’s the worst of it.”
Carys’s throat worked. “Okay.”
“And you don’t owe me anything now.” Rory smiled. It shook. She didn’t hide it. “But if you text me when Mitchell decides to destroy your curtains at three a.m., I’ll be awake anyway. And if you have a night where you go quiet in your own head afterward—well. I can sit in the Nest and name all the lines on that Sahara map until you get bored enough to laugh at me.”
Carys huffed, a sound like a held breath finding its way out. “I missed you,” she said simply.
“I missed you.” Rory set her teacup down, the saucer clicking gently . “That’s what I have.”
The door chimed again. A gust of cold swept in a handful of customers, shoulders hunched, cheeks pinked with wind. Silas moved down the bar, a ship’s captain dealing with a new tide. The neon outside hummed. The old maps on the walls looked on, their printed mistakes and outdated borders undisturbed by the smallness and enormity of two women finding each other again over lime and tea.
Carys checked the watch she wore slung on the inside of her wrist like a secret. “I need to go pretend to sleep before someone knocks at four with a headache they’ve had since 1987.”
“Go,” Rory said. Her mouth tasted like oolong and relief. “I’m here.”
Carys’s hands were warm when they came around Rory briefly, a small, grounded hug that said more than most speeches. She smelled of hospital and winter and something sharp that might have been the lime. She stepped back. The grin threatened, then she got it under control. “I’ll text. I mean it.”
“I’ll judge your station kettle.”
“Please do. It respects no one.”
Carys tucked gloves into her pocket with a motion so practiced it had lived in her body for years. At the door she paused and looked back. There was a second where the old and the new Carys stood one in front of the other, and Rory, who had never believed in ghosts, believed in this one.
“Night, Rory.”
“Night, Caz.”
The door shut on the word and the night swallowed her. The neon hum steadied. Rory stood very still, fingers on the lip of her saucer until the world felt like a thing she was allowed to touch again.
Silas appeared at her elbow with the lightness of a man who hadn’t limped a day in his life. He set a bao bun in front of her. His ring flashed and went dull again. “On the house,” he said.
“Since when?” Rory asked, managing a wryness that earned her a soft snort.
“Since you needed feeding.” He watched her a second, not touching whatever he saw. “Good to see old ships make harbour.”
She huffed. “You were listening.”
“I have ears.” He gestured to the bar, then the shelf with the cracked spine. “And the good sense not to pretend I don’t.” He began to move down the bar and then reached out, tapping the map of Africa with two fingers. “Borders change,” he said. “People, too.”
“Profound,” she said, because it was easier than thank you.
“Tragically,” he said, and limped away to rescue a young man from his second whisky.
Rory ate in small, neat bites and watched the door as if it might give her back something else she hadn’t thought to ask for. Her phone sat face-down beside the cup. She resisted flipping it for a full five minutes, which felt like grace.
When it finally buzzed, the text was a photograph of a sullen ginger cat glaring at the camera like it had wronged him personally. Underneath: Mitchell hates your face already. We’re going to be great friends.
Rory laughed, again, alone and not alone. Above her, the flat would be cold at first, then generous. The scooter would complain in the morning and then behave. The city would be itself, loud and forgiven. She slid her thumb across the screen and started a list in the blue-elasticated book: cat treats, talk to Yu-Fei about swapping Tuesdays, kettle complaints to research. The pen hovered and then moved on its own: Carys: station visit, limen and limes.
She closed the book around that and wiped a bit of sauce from the corner of her mouth. Outside, somewhere, a siren wound up, threaded its way through the streets, and was gone .