Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQG99Y6QP48M196373AQ7M

The green neon sign buzzed overhead as Aurora pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest, shaking rain from her jacket. The familiar smell hit her first—oak and whiskey and something faintly like old paper, the accumulated scent of decades of secrets traded in low voices. She'd lived above this place for eight months now, but she still wasn't used to the way it could feel like stepping backward through time. The dinner rush at Golden Empress had run late, and her feet ached from hours of navigating London's rain-slicked streets on her delivery bike. All she wanted was a quiet corner, maybe one of Silas's better whiskeys if he was feeling generous, and the particular kind of solitude that only a crowded room could provide. She was halfway to her usual spot at the end of the bar when she saw him. He sat alone at a table beneath one of Silas's old maps—this one of Prague, she'd noticed before, with a small red pin stuck somewhere near the river. His hair was shorter than she remembered, cropped close to his skull in a way that made his face look older, more angular. He'd grown a beard, neatly trimmed, threaded with early grey despite the fact that he couldn't be more than thirty. But it was his posture that stopped her—the careful way he held himself, shoulders curved inward as if bracing against a wind that wasn't there. Marcus Chen had always been the most confident person she'd ever known. She stood frozen in the middle of the bar, caught between the door and the life she'd built in its absence. Around her, conversations continued their gentle murmur, glasses clinked, someone laughed at something that wasn't particularly funny. The world kept moving while she tried to remember how to breathe. He looked up. For a moment, neither of them moved. Aurora watched recognition dawn across his features, watched it transform into something more complicated—surprise, certainly, but underneath it a flicker of what might have been fear. Or hope. She'd never been good at reading Marcus, not really. That had been part of the problem. "Rory." He said her name like it was a word he'd forgotten the meaning of and was only now remembering. "Christ. Rory Carter." She made herself walk toward him, each step a small act of courage. "Marcus. I didn't expect—" She stopped, because what could she possibly say? I didn't expect you to be here. I didn't expect you to be alive. I didn't expect to feel anything at all. "Sit down," he said, and then, as if remembering himself: "Please. If you want." She sat. Up close, the changes were more pronounced. There were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there before, and a scar she didn't recognize running along his jaw, disappearing into the edge of his beard. His hands, wrapped around a glass of something amber, were rougher than she remembered. Working hands, now. She thought of the smooth, ink-stained fingers that had once turned pages of law texts beside her in the Cardiff library, and something in her chest turned over. "What are you doing here?" she asked. The question felt inadequate, but it was the only one she had. "I could ask you the same thing." He attempted a smile, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Last I heard, you were still in Cardiff. Something about finishing your law degree." "Last you heard was three years ago." The words landed harder than she'd intended. Marcus flinched, and she watched him absorb the blow with that new stillness of his. The Marcus she'd known would have deflected, would have turned her accusation into a joke, would have slid past the discomfort with the easy charm that had always been his first defense. This Marcus just nodded. "I know," he said quietly. "I'm sorry." Aurora reached up and rubbed absently at the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a childhood habit she'd never broken. "You disappeared. Right after graduation. Vanished like you'd never existed. Sarah said you'd gone abroad, but she didn't know where. James thought maybe—" She stopped herself. "It doesn't matter what James thought." "James always did think the worst of me." "Can you blame him?" Marcus looked down at his drink. In the dim light of the bar, surrounded by Silas's collection of old photographs and memories, he looked like just another ghost. "No," he said. "I can't." Behind the bar, she could see Silas polishing glasses with his usual methodical attention, his silver signet ring catching the light. He was watching them—of course he was, Silas watched everything—but when Aurora caught his eye, he simply inclined his head and turned away. Whatever this was, he was leaving it to her. "You look different," Marcus said. "So do you." "I mean—" He made a vague gesture that encompassed her entirely. "You look like you're actually here. Present. You used to always seem like you were somewhere else, thinking about the next thing, the better thing. Now you look like you've stopped running." The accuracy of it stung. Aurora thought about her flat upstairs, small and cluttered with secondhand books and the accumulated debris of a life she was still learning to live. She thought about the delivery bag in the back room, about the routes through London she'd memorized, about the way Yu-Fei always packed extra dumplings for her at the end of a long shift. It wasn't the life she'd planned. It wasn't the life anyone had planned for her. But it was hers. "I stopped running," she said. "About eight months ago. I live upstairs, actually. Work at a restaurant down the street." Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or judgment, or the ghost of both. "You left law school?" "I left a lot of things." She met his eyes steadily, daring him to say what she knew he was thinking. Aurora Carter, who was supposed to be a barrister by now, who was supposed to be making her father proud, who was supposed to be everything she'd been raised to be. Aurora Carter, delivering fried rice on a bicycle and sleeping in a flat the size of her mother's walk-in closet. But Marcus just nodded slowly, as if he understood. And maybe, looking at him now—at the calluses on his hands and the grey in his beard and the way he held himself like someone who'd learned to take up less space—maybe he did. "I was in the military," he said. "After I left. Just for a year and a half—they medically discharged me after—" He touched the scar on his jaw, an unconscious gesture. "Anyway. After that, I tried a few things. Construction. Fishing boats up in Scotland for a while. Now I drive lorries. Long-haul stuff, mostly. It's quiet." Aurora tried to reconcile this with the Marcus she'd known—ambitious, driven, destined for the diplomatic corps or maybe Parliament. The Marcus who'd stayed up all night arguing about international law, who'd had opinions about everything and the vocabulary to defend them. The Marcus who'd once told her, with the absolute certainty of youth, that he was going to change the world. "What happened?" she asked, and then immediately wished she hadn't. It was too big a question for a chance encounter in a Soho bar. It was the kind of question that required years to answer. Marcus was quiet for a long moment. Around them, the bar continued its gentle hum—the clink of glasses, the murmur of voices, the creak of old floorboards under uncertain feet. Aurora watched Silas's slight limp as he moved behind the counter, and she wondered how many other people in this room were carrying wounds that didn't show. "I woke up one day," Marcus finally said, "and I realized I couldn't remember who I was supposed to be anymore. Everything I'd worked for, everything I'd planned—it was like looking at a photograph of someone else's life. And I thought, if I don't leave now, I never will. So I left." "Without telling anyone." "I didn't know how to explain it. I didn't have the words." He wrapped his hands more tightly around his glass, and Aurora noticed they were trembling slightly. "I think I was afraid that if I tried to explain, someone would talk me out of it. And I wasn't strong enough to stay." Aurora thought about Evan. About the flat in Cardiff she'd shared with him, about the way he'd slowly dismantled her confidence piece by piece until she couldn't remember what it felt like to trust her own judgment. About the night Eva had called from London—just checking in, she'd said, but there had been something in her voice, a lifeline thrown across the distance—and Aurora had packed a bag and left while Evan was at work. No note. No explanation. Just gone. "I understand," she said, and meant it. Marcus looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd sat down, she saw something of the person she'd known in his eyes. Not the ambition or the charm, but something underneath—a vulnerability he'd always kept carefully hidden, protected by layers of wit and confidence and careful deflection. "I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye," he said. "I'm sorry I wasn't there when you needed—" "You didn't know I needed anything." "I should have. We were friends, Rory. We were—" He stopped, and she watched him struggle with words he'd never learned to say. "I should have known." The weight of everything unspoken hung between them. Three years of silence. The people they'd been, and the people they'd become, and the vast distance between the two. Aurora thought about all the things she might have said to him, once—about Evan, about her father's disappointment, about the nights she'd spent wondering if she'd made the right choice. She thought about the comfort she might have found in his voice, if only he'd been there to offer it. But he hadn't been. And she'd survived anyway. "I forgive you," she said, and was surprised to find she meant it. Marcus blinked. "Just like that?" "Just like that." She reached across the table and touched his hand briefly—rough with calluses, warm despite the cold rain outside. "We were kids, Marcus. We didn't know how to be people yet. We still don't, not really. But we're trying." He let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for years. "Yeah," he said. "We're trying." Silas appeared at their table with two glasses of his better whiskey, setting them down without comment before disappearing back behind the bar. Aurora caught his eye and nodded her thanks. He'd always had a gift for knowing when people needed fortification. "To trying," Marcus said, raising his glass. Aurora clinked hers against it. The whiskey was smooth, warming a path down her chest, and she let herself feel the simple pleasure of being alive, being here, being present in this moment with someone who'd known her before she'd learned to know herself. Outside, the rain continued to fall. Inside The Raven's Nest, time moved strangely, the way it always did in places weighted with history and secrets and the accumulated debris of human lives. And two people who'd once been friends, and then been strangers, began the slow, uncertain work of becoming something new.