Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQFQR5BEKJ1X5GQMQZVXBE

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bled into the wet pavement like a wound, and Rory almost walked past it. She'd been upstairs in her flat for three days straight, sleeping badly, eating worse, subsisting on cold rice from containers Yu-Fei pressed into her hands at the end of her shifts. Tonight the walls had started to close in—the damp spot on the ceiling above her bed spreading into new and troubling shapes—and she'd pulled on her jacket and come down the back stairs into the alley, meaning to walk, not drink. But the side door to the bar was propped open with a brick, and warm air and the low murmur of a Thursday crowd reached her, and she thought: one drink. Just one, to unknot the thing sitting between her shoulder blades. She came in through the kitchen corridor rather than the front, passing the framed black-and-white photographs that lined the narrow hallway—old Soho, the kind of London that existed now only in the memories of people who lied about having been there. The bar was half-full, which for a Thursday was respectable. Silas was behind the counter, drying a pint glass with his usual unhurried precision, his silver signet ring catching the low light every time he turned his wrist. He glanced up when she appeared at the end of the bar and gave her the smallest nod, the one that meant he'd already started pouring her drink. She settled onto the last stool near the wall, beneath an old Ordnance Survey map of somewhere in the Cairngorms, and waited. That was when she saw him. He was sitting in the booth nearest the bookshelf, the one that Silas reserved for regulars and people he was deciding whether to trust. He had a glass of something amber in front of him, barely touched. His hair was shorter than she remembered, shorn close at the sides in a way that made his face look leaner, older. He wore a charcoal coat she'd never seen, well-cut, expensive in the way that didn't advertise itself. But it was the posture she recognized first—that particular way he had of sitting with one arm draped across the back of the booth, fingers loose, as though the world were a coat he could shrug off at any moment. Niall Brennan. Five years, give or take. The last time she'd seen him, he'd been standing on the platform at Cardiff Central, laughing at something she'd said, his rucksack slung over one shoulder, telling her he'd be back in three months. Budapest, he'd said. A consultancy gig. Three months had turned into silence, and the silence had turned into the kind of absence that calcifies, that stops being a question and becomes simply a fact of the landscape. She could have left. She was good at leaving—had gotten better at it, these past two years. But he looked up, the way people do when they feel the weight of someone's gaze, and his eyes found hers across the dim room, and she watched recognition move through his face like weather across open ground. "Rory." He said it quietly, but she heard it perfectly. The bar wasn't that loud, and the name wasn't that long. She picked up the gin and tonic Silas had placed in front of her without comment and carried it to his booth. She didn't sit down. Not yet. She stood at the edge of the table and looked at him, cataloguing the changes: the faint scar above his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before, the new stillness in his hands, the way his eyes had lost some quality she could only describe as softness. He looked like someone who'd been through a machine and come out functional but rearranged. "You've got some nerve," she said, "showing up in my bar." "Your bar?" "I live upstairs." Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. More like a recalibration. "I didn't know that." "There's a lot you don't know." She sat down across from him, setting her glass on the scarred table. "It's been five years, Niall." "Four years and eight months." "Right. Because the four months make all the difference." He almost smiled. Almost. It was there in the corner of his mouth, a ghost of the expression she remembered—that crooked, self-deprecating grin that had made half the girls at Cardiff want to kill him or kiss him. But it didn't quite land. It hung there, unfinished, and then faded. "You look different," he said. "I look tired. There's a difference." "No. That's not what I mean." He studied her the way he used to study case law, back when they were both pretending to care about their degrees—with that focused, almost forensic attention that had always made her feel simultaneously seen and dissected. "You look like you've stopped trying to be someone else." The accuracy of it stung, and she covered it by taking a long sip of her drink. Behind the bar, Silas had moved to the other end, ostensibly polishing glasses, but Rory could feel his awareness like a low frequency hum. He missed nothing, Silas. It was the thing that made him both an excellent barman and an unsettling landlord. "So," she said. "Budapest." "Budapest was a long time ago." "Was it even real? The consultancy?" Niall turned his glass on the table, a slow quarter-rotation. The amber liquid caught the light from the pendant lamp above the booth and held it. "It was real enough. For about six weeks. Then it became something else." "Something you can't talk about." "Something I chose not to talk about. There's a difference." She felt the old irritation rise, familiar as a scar. He'd always done this—parceled out information like currency, controlling the exchange rate. Back at university, she'd found it intriguing. Mysterious. Now it just made her tired. "Niall, I thought you were dead." The words came out harder than she'd intended, and she watched them land. He didn't flinch, but something behind his eyes contracted, a tightening she might have missed if she hadn't once known his face as well as she knew the crescent-shaped scar on her own wrist. "I know," he said. "I'm sorry." "That's it? You're sorry?" "What else is there?" "An explanation. A reason. Something better than a three-word sentence and a glass of whisky in a Soho bar." He leaned forward, and she caught a scent she didn't recognize—something clean and astringent, nothing like the cheap cologne he'd worn at twenty. "I got into trouble," he said. "The kind that follows you. I couldn't come back to Cardiff without bringing it with me, and I couldn't—" He stopped. Started again. "There were people I was trying to keep safe." "People. Meaning me." "Meaning you. Meaning Brendan and Jenny. Meaning everyone I'd ever been stupid enough to care about in a city small enough to find them." The use of her parents' names hit her like a slap. She hadn't heard anyone call her mother Jenny in years—not since the funeral, and Niall didn't know about the funeral, she realized. He didn't know about any of it. Not about her mother's diagnosis, or the six months of treatment that hadn't worked, or the way her father had retreated into his chambers at the law offices and stopped coming home for dinner. Not about Evan, certainly—the charm and then the cruelty and then the morning she'd looked at the bruise on her forearm and decided that she was done being a person things happened to. He didn't know about Eva's phone call, the lifeline thrown across a hundred and fifty miles of motorway. He didn't know about London, or Yu-Fei, or Silas, or this second life she'd built from the wreckage of the first. He was sitting across from her like a man visiting a country he'd once known, finding the streets renamed and the landmarks moved. "My mum died," she said. "Eighteen months ago. Pancreatic." The color left his face. It happened all at once, a draining, and for the first time all evening he looked like the boy she remembered—raw, unguarded, knocked clean out of whatever armor he'd been wearing. "Rory. Christ. Jenny." "Yeah." "I didn't—God, I'm so sorry. I didn't know." "How could you? You were busy being a ghost." He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and she let him. She wasn't being cruel, or she didn't think she was. She was being honest, which was a different kind of violence—the kind that left cleaner wounds. When he lowered his hands, his eyes were red but dry. "I should have been there." "Yes." "I should have found a way." "Probably." "I kept thinking I'd come back when it was safe. When I'd sorted everything out. But it never—" He shook his head. "You tell yourself you'll come back, and then one year becomes two, and two becomes four, and at some point you realize you've become the absence. You're not a person anymore. You're just the shape of where a person used to be." Rory looked at him across the table, across the five years that sat between them like a body of dark water. She thought about what Silas had told her once, late at night, when she'd asked him about his years in the field. People don't disappear, he'd said, refilling her glass with his usual economy of motion. They just stop being visible. It's not the same thing. "Who are you now?" she asked. Niall held her gaze. The pendant lamp swung slightly in a draft from the kitchen corridor, sending shadows across the old maps on the walls. "I'm not sure," he said. "That's partly why I'm here." "Here as in London? Or here as in this bar?" "Both. Neither." He picked up his whisky, finally, and took a drink. Set it down. "I've been back in England for two weeks. I've been walking past this place every night for three of those days, trying to work up the nerve to come in." "You didn't know I lived here." "No. But I knew Silas." The admission rearranged something. She glanced toward the bar, where Silas was serving a couple at the far end, his posture easy, unhurried. He didn't look their way. He didn't need to. "Silas," she said slowly. "You know Silas." "Not well. But enough." A thread she hadn't known existed pulled taut between two parts of her life, and she felt the vertigo of it—the sudden understanding that the world was smaller and more interconnected than she'd been comfortable believing. "We're going to come back to that," she said. "I expected we would." They sat in silence for a moment, the bar murmuring around them. A couple laughed near the front window. Someone fed coins into the old jukebox by the door and selected something with a trumpet, slow and melancholy. Rory traced the rim of her glass with one finger and felt the familiar pressure behind her breastbone—not anger, exactly, though anger was part of it. Something more like grief for the versions of themselves that had existed at twenty, on that train platform, in a world where three months meant three months and people came back when they said they would. "I can't just forgive you," she said. "You understand that." "I'm not asking you to." "Then what are you asking?" Niall looked at her, and she saw it then—the thing beneath the new coat and the close-cropped hair and the careful, measured stillness. She saw the exhaustion. Not the kind that came from too little sleep, but the deeper kind, the kind that settled into the bones of a person who had been carrying something too heavy for too long without anyone to hand it to. "I'm asking you to let me sit here," he said. "For a little while. That's all." Rory looked at him for a long moment. Then she raised her hand, caught Silas's eye down the length of the bar, and held up two fingers. Silas reached for a fresh glass without a word. She turned back to Niall. "You're buying," she said. And the ghost of that old crooked smile finally, tentatively, landed.