Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQFW81SCVDQWZSJFSTEQKB

The green neon above the door had begun to sputter again, casting the wet pavement in a fitful emerald glow that matched the bruise Rory had been nursing on her elbow since morning. She pushed into The Raven's Nest, shaking rain from her straight black hair, the bell overhead chiming a flat note that died against the walls. The warmth inside hit her face—amber light, the smell of spilled stout and the particular pipe tobacco Silas Blackwood swore he'd quit three winters ago. The walls pressed close, lined with black-and-white photographs of old Soho and moth-eaten maps of places Rory had never visited, though she climbed past them every night to the flat that waited above. She was reaching up to touch the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist—an old habit when she was bone-tired—when she saw him. Julian Ashford sat at the far end of the bar, his posture unchanged from their law school days: shoulders squared as if preparing for cross-examination, spine not touching the back of the stool. He wore a charcoal overcoat draped across the neighboring seat, the wool heavy enough to suggest a Savile Row tailor, and his right hand cupped a tumbler of Scotch in a way that suggested ownership rather than appetite. His hair had thinned at the temples and gone the color of early frost, but his profile still carried that prosecution-barrister sharpness, the kind that had made him notorious in the moot courts at Cardiff. Rory froze. She caught her reflection in the mirror behind the bar—straight black hair plastered dark by rain, skin pale, those bright blue eyes that had once convinced professors she was paying attention when she was actually planning her escape. She looked away quickly, but she'd been seen. Her fingers found the scar again, the small raised half-moon from a broken glass at her mother's birthday party when she was nine. She hadn't thought of Julian in eighteen months, perhaps longer. Not since she'd stopped checking the Cardiff alumni newsletter, not since she'd trained herself to see Evan's shadow in every unexpected male silhouette. She tried to step back toward the stairs, but her boot scuffed against the brass rail of the coat rack. The sound was small, but Julian turned. His eyes—grey-green, she remembered abruptly, the color of the Bristol Channel on an overcast day—found her immediately. Three years dissolved in the span of his blink. "Aurora?" The name landed like a stone in still water. In London, she was Rory. Even Silas, wiping glasses at the opposite end of the bar with his silver signet ring catching the light, called her Rory. The syllables felt foreign now, weighted down by her father's disappointed expectations and the echo of Evan's voice in the dark. Julian stood. He moved with the same controlled economy she remembered, though he favored his left leg slightly—no, that was Silas's limp she was noticing, the old knee injury from Prague. Julian moved with the fluidity of someone who still ran every morning before chambers. "Aurora Carter," he said, closer now, and she caught the scent of his cologne, sandalwood and something metallic, like coins held too long in a closed hand. "My God. I thought you were dead." Rory managed a smile that felt like it cracked something in her face. "Not quite. Just... relocated." "In Soho." His gaze traveled over her—taking in the damp Golden Empress delivery jacket she'd forgotten to remove, the jeans dark with rain at the cuffs, the boots worn soft at the heels. "You're working for Yu-Fei Cheung?" "Part-time," she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, Cardiff-bred precision flattened by London consonants and three years of swallowing her words. "Deliveries. It keeps me mobile." Julian's expression flickered—confusion, perhaps, or the dawning realization that the trajectory they'd once shared had diverged so radically that they now occupied different atmospheres. He had been her study partner for two years, the brilliant boy from Penarth who corrected her Latin citations with red pen and brought her coffee during exam season. They had talked of silk, of appellate courts, of changing the machinery of justice from within. Now he looked at her as if she were a painting hung crooked, familiar in composition but jarring in execution. "You disappeared," he said quietly. "Three years ago. Middle of the Michaelmas term. Your father wouldn't say where you'd gone. Your mother stopped coming to the Inn's Christmas parties." Rory moved past him to the bar, needing the solid oak between her and the past. "Whiskey," she said to Silas, who nodded without comment, his hazel eyes flicking between them with the observant neutrality of a man who had once made his living decoding dangerous silences. He poured two fingers of Jameson and pushed it across the scarred wood with a hand that bore the silver ring, never speaking, always watching. "I had to leave," Rory said, wrapping her fingers around the glass. The scar on her wrist faced upward, exposed. Julian's eyes caught on it, and she saw him catalog it—new damage, he must think, though it was older than their friendship. "Personal reasons." "Evan," Julian said. It wasn't a question. Rory's hand tightened on the glass. She thought of the flat above them, the small rooms with the slanted ceiling where she slept with a chair wedged under the doorknob, though Evan was three hundred miles away and reportedly dating a solicitor from Bristol now. She thought of the scars he had left that no one could see, and this small crescent moon on her wrist that everyone assumed was his work but wasn't. "You knew?" she asked. "I suspected. He came looking for you, once. After you'd gone." Julian took his own seat again, but he didn't sit so tall now. The shoulders had dropped, imperceptibly. "He was... persuasive. Claimed you'd had a breakdown, that you needed protecting from yourself. Your father believed him. I didn't." Rory tasted copper on her tongue. The green neon above the door reflected in the whiskey, turning it bilious, sickly. "Why didn't you say something? Back then?" Julian looked at the maps on the walls, the photographs of strangers. "Because I was twenty-three and ambitious, and I didn't want to believe that someone like you—someone with your mind—could let yourself be diminished like that. It was easier to believe you were just stressed about exams. Then you were gone, and I spent three years learning exactly how much silence weighs." The bar filled with the evening crowd, shapes moving in the peripheral haze, but they remained in the amber pocket of light, suspended. Rory could see the lines around his eyes now, the cost of the success he wore like armor. He was silk now, she realized. Queen's Counsel, probably. Everything they had planned for her. "I couldn't stay," she said. "For what it's worth, I couldn't stay and I couldn't explain. Eva called, and I ran. I'm good at running now. It's one of my skills." "You live here," Julian said, gesturing upward at the ceiling with a motion that included the water stains and the faint bass notes of the flat above. "Above a bar in Soho." "Yes." "Your father still asks after you. At the Cardiff circuit." Rory touched the scar again, tracing the crescent. "I know. I send postcards." "Postcards." The word sounded bitter in Julian's mouth. He reached into his coat and withdrew a slim card case, extracted a rectangle of heavy cream stock. "I'm at the Royal Courts of Justice all week. Appeal case. If you wanted to talk. Properly." Rory took the card. His chambers' address embossed in gold. It felt like a ticket to a country whose citizenship she'd surrendered. "I won't," she said honestly, tucking it into her pocket anyway. "But thank you." Julian nodded as if she'd confirmed a suspicion. He finished his Scotch in one movement, the liquid disappearing like a magic trick. "You were the best moot court partner I ever had, Aurora. You would have been brilliant." "I was someone else then," she said. "Weren't we all." He stood, buttoning his coat. For a moment, he looked as though he might embrace her, but the space between them had grown too wide, filled with the unsaid things—her shame, his complicity in his own blindness, the years they'd both spent becoming people who could survive their younger selves' expectations. Instead, he touched her hand briefly, his fingers brushing the scar, not knowing it was from her childhood, perhaps thinking it was a souvenir of the war she'd fought alone. "Goodbye, Rory," he said. She didn't correct him. She watched him walk to the door, out into the green neon and the rain, becoming a silhouette and then nothing. Rory sat at the bar for a long time, the whiskey warming nothing, the weight of the card heavy in her pocket. Silas moved behind her, his limp barely perceptible as he collected Julian's empty glass, the silver signet ring flashing once before he retreated into the shadows. Upstairs, her flat waited, small and safe. She touched the scar one last time, a crescent moon in the dark, and finished her drink alone.