AI On quiet nights, the neon raven buzzed like an insect trapped in glass.
Aurora—Rory, in the language of every one who knew her before and a few who’d insisted on knowing her after—watched its green light smear against the wet pavement outside. Each time the door opened, the glow broke and scattered, then reformed. Like it was practising .
Inside, The Raven’s Nest breathed low and steady. A Tuesday hum. The old maps on the walls had gone yellow at the edges, their seas the wrong colours. Black-and-white photographs of people no one alive could name stared out over the scarred tables. The air smelled of stale hops, lemon rind, and the ghost of cigarettes that had clung to the brick since the eighties.
Silas was at the far end of the bar, polishing a glass that didn’t need polishing. He did that when he was thinking or when his knee hurt. Tonight, Rory suspected both. The overhead light caught on his silver signet ring as he turned the glass in his hand, the metal flashing each time it rotated past the tap handles.
“Top up, love?” he asked a woman nursing the dregs of a lager, all without looking like he was asking .
Rory rinsed out a shaker, the metal cool and slick under her fingers. A faint ache traced along the crescent scar on her left wrist, as if the cold had woken it. She flexed her hand, shook off the sensation, and slid a gin and tonic across to a man in a navy blazer who’d said “whatever’s decent” in the tone of someone who expected every thing to be.
The door opened. The raven sign sizzled green against the silhouettes coming in—three of them, shapes more than faces at first. City folk by the outline, she thought: shoulders tense, phones still in hand. A scatter of cold air and the smell of outside—car exhaust, rain beginning perhaps.
She wasn’t watching them. Not really . She was catching a reflection in the bar mirror, counting new arrivals by instinct, marking who seemed likely to linger, who would be trouble. It was habit more than work. Silas had once told her that knowing who was about to become a problem was three-quarters of preventing it.
Then a laugh cut across the bar—bright and familiar and entirely out of place.
It wasn’t the sound itself so much as the way it hit her chest. A pressure, then a hollowing. She went still, her hand halfway to the lemon jar.
The woman attached to the laugh stepped into the light. Her hair, once a wild copper halo under terrible club lighting, was now straightened and drawn back into a sleek knot at the nape of her neck. She wore a dark green dress that meant business more than seduction, a wool coat folded over her arm. Gold hoop earrings. A slim leather work bag that looked expensive enough that Rory could imagine the firm paying for it.
Niamh O’Connell.
The name rose in her like something fizzy, like panic, like sixth-form exams. She tasted cheap vodka and the burned edges of toast in a shared Cardiff kitchen, laughter at two a.m. over case summaries neither of them had properly read.
For a moment, Niamh was sixteen again, freckled and fierce, dragging Rory out behind the school to smoke menthols and swear they’d escape to somewhere that wasn’t grey and wasn’t full of people who knew their fathers. For a moment, they were nineteen at some fresher’s week party, drunk on the idea that they’d change the world with cross-examination and good shoes.
Then Niamh looked up and the years rearranged themselves on her face. The baby fat was gone , cheekbones sharper now. There were faint lines at the corners of her mouth, the kind etched more from clenching than smiling.
She froze when she saw Rory.
The two men with her—a blond one with tired eyes, a dark-haired one with the easy slouch of someone who liked his own reflection—had already veered toward a high table. They didn’t notice the way Niamh’s hand tightened on her bag strap, or the micro-hesitation in her step.
“Alright, Niamh?” the blond one called over his shoulder. “You want a—”
“Yeah,” she said, but she didn’t look away from Rory. Her voice was that same Dublin lilt eased by years in Cardiff and flattened a bit by London. “I’ll be over. Just—give me a sec.”
Rory realised she was still holding the shaker. Her fingers had gone white around it.
She put it down deliberately . Clink on metal. Breathe in, out. She’d imagined this reunion a dozen ways in sleepless London nights, and in none of those ways was she wearing a stained Raven’s Nest T-shirt with lime under her nails and hair pulled back in a hasty knot.
Niamh reached the bar. Up close, the changes were more precise. Foundation expertly blended. A small scar on her chin Rory didn’t remember. Nails short, painted a pale, professional pink.
“Aurora,” Niamh said, and there it was—that old half-mocking emphasis, as if the name were a theatrical costume they both knew she didn’t quite fill. “Fuck. It is you.”
“Hi, Nem,” Rory said, the old nickname slipping out before she could vet it. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, lighter than she felt. “Long time.”
Understatement was a safe country. She stayed there.
Silas glanced up at the sound of that faltering recognition. His hazel eyes flicked from Niamh to Rory, noting, storing. He hesitated just a fraction, then turned away, his limp more pronounced as he headed toward the other end of the bar, granting space without making a show of it.
Niamh let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “Jesus. Of all the places.” She looked around the bar as if seeing it properly now—the maps, the photographs, the low ceiling stained with the ghosts of too many winters. “You work here?”
The question came out before she could soften it.
Rory felt her shoulders tighten. “Yeah. Couple of nights a week.” She shrugged. “Keeps me in rent and takeaway.”
Niamh’s gaze flicked down to the bar mat, then back up. “Right. Yeah. Of course.” She seemed to catch herself, rearranging her expression into something more neutral. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“You meant exactly what you meant,” Rory said, and to her surprise there was no heat in it. Just tired amusement. “What can I get you?”
“Old habits and all that,” Niamh said, with a flash of rue she hadn’t had at nineteen. “Gin and tonic? Whatever’s not from the bottom shelf.”
“This is Soho, not first year,” Rory said. “We’ve shelved up since then.”
The corner of Niamh’s mouth twitched. Rory reached for the good gin. Her hands moved on autopilot—ice, lime, the quick pour and spin. When she slid the drink over, their fingers almost touched. Niamh’s nails, her own scar.
“How long have you been in London?” Niamh asked. She took a sip, eyes closing briefly as the cold hit. “Last I heard you’d vanished off the face of the earth.”
Rory leaned back against the beer fridge. The hum vibrated through her spine. “A few years. Came up after… after things went sideways.”
“You mean after you dropped out and stopped answering any of my messages.” No accusation in Niamh’s tone, but no real forgiveness either. Just fact.
Rory picked up a cloth, wiped at a ring of condensation that didn’t need wiping. “Yeah. After that.”
Niamh glanced over her shoulder at her colleagues. The blond was already deep into some story, gesturing with a bottle, the other man laughing too loudly. Their table was a little island of navy suits and loosened ties in the den of worn leather jackets and charity-shop coats.
“I’ve got…” She hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. “I told them I’d meet them in a minute. Can I—do you have a break? Or is that not how this works?”
Rory studied her. The old part of her, the one that knew how many sugars Niamh took in her tea and the exact shape of her handwriting in lecture notes, wanted to say yes immediately. The part that had learned to count exits and keep conversations angled away from exposed places hesitated.
Silas solved it. He materialised at her elbow with the quiet efficiency that used to frighten men with guns, now used on drunks and flirtatious investment bankers.
“I’ll cover,” he said, voice pitched low. His gaze flicked to Niamh, assessing. “Ten minutes. Smoke break, if anyone asks.” His hand squeezed her shoulder once, his signet ring cool against her collarbone, then he moved away before she could thank him.
Niamh’s eyebrows rose. “He always appear like that?”
“Occupational hazard,” Rory said. “Come on.”
She pushed through the staff door at the back, letting Niamh follow into the short, dim corridor that led to the alley. The walls were painted an institutional cream that showed every scuff. A metal door at the end bore a sign—EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—that every one ignored.
The alley smelled of bin bags and wet brick. A van rumbled somewhere nearby. Above, the night sky was a city smear, reflecting back the neon and window light.
Niamh hugged her coat tighter around herself. “Still don’t smoke?” she asked.
“Still pretend I might start,” Rory said, leaning against the brick, the cold seeping through her T-shirt. “You?”
“Quit last year. Or so I tell my mother.” Niamh smiled without much humour. “She likes to think she’s had some moral victory.”
Rory looked at her profile in the half-light. There was something both familiar and alien in it, the way time had added layers rather than simply replacing what was there. “She still in Galway?”
“Yeah. Dad’s retired. They bought a dog. Send more photos of it than they ever did of me.” Niamh paused. “Your parents? Brendan still terrifying first-years?”
“He’ll be terrifying juries till the day he dies,” Rory said. A flutter, like guilt, murmured under her ribs. “Mum’s… Mum. Still correcting every one’s grammar, still pretending I’m moving back any day now.”
“Are you?” Niamh asked quietly.
Rory blew out a breath, watched it fog in the cold. “No.”
The alley collected the word and didn’t echo it back. Somewhere inside, a burst of laughter rode a wave of music.
“So,” Niamh said, after a few seconds. “Bartender in Soho. That’s… not what I pictured for you.”
“What did you picture?” Rory asked. “Be kind.”
“A courtroom,” Niamh said simply. “You in one of those ridiculous wigs, absolutely bullying some poor witness into admitting they were lying. You always had the better memory for details.” She nudged a bit of gravel with the toe of her heel. “I thought you’d be the one ahead of me. Doing human rights or criminal defence, not shovelling paperwork for asset management.”
“You’re a solicitor then.” Rory already knew. It was in the way she carried herself. But it felt right to ask.
“Yeah. Corporate. Contracts, acquisitions, all the glamorous stuff.” A wry twist to her mouth. “Turns out, not many firms want you saving the world. But they’ll pay obscene money for you to help rich men stay rich.”
“Flattering,” Rory said.
“Depressing,” Niamh countered. “But it pays the rent.” She glanced toward the end of the alley, where the streetlight cut a sharp rectangle on the pavement. “And it’s… something. A path.”
Rory chewed the inside of her cheek. “And I took the scenic route through minimum wage and questionable Chinese scooters.”
“Questionable what?”
“Don’t ask.” She considered telling Niamh about Yu-Fei’s Golden Empress, about weaving through London traffic with hot plastic bags bumping against her knees, feeling more alive and more invisible than ever. Decided against it. “Anyway. Life happened. Uni didn’t.”
Niamh looked at her, really looked now, eyes travelling over the faded black T-shirt, the faint shadows under her eyes, the way she kept one hand unconsciously near her stomach, as if braced.
“He did something, didn’t he?” Niamh said softly . “Evan.”
The name landed between them like a dropped glass. Rory’s throat tightened.
She shouldn’t be surprised. Niamh had always been sharp, always reading more than you meant to show. But the specificness of it still knocked the air sideways in her chest.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Rory said.
“Alright.” Niamh didn’t push. That was new. At nineteen she would have demanded details. Time had taught her something after all. “But I need you to know… we didn’t know. Me, Cerys, Tom. We thought you’d just… fallen in love with some bloke and gone all boring.” A self-directed grimace. “I sent you messages. You never—”
“I know,” Rory said. The shame of those unanswered blue ticks had clung to her for years. “I read them. I just… couldn’t be that girl with you anymore. The one who thought we’d all be barristers by twenty-five and sharing an office in some gleaming glass tower.”
Niamh laughed softly . “We were idiots.”
“Confident ones,” Rory said. “That’s the worst kind.”
A pause. The wind shifted, carrying a sliver of night bus exhaust.
“You could still go back, you know,” Niamh said. “If you wanted. Law. There are routes. Access courses, part-time. You were always better at it than me.”
“I left.” Rory kept her eyes on a crack in the brick opposite, on the way moss clung stubbornly in the mortar. “I ran. And once you start running… it’s hard to remember how to stand still long enough to apply for anything.”
“People change their minds all the time.”
“Do they?” Rory said, more sharply than she intended. “Or do they just change shapes to fit inside their choices?”
Niamh studied her for a long moment. “You talk like someone who reads philosophy in bed.”
“Chapter a day, between Deliveroo and existential dread.”
“That’s the Aurora Carter I remember.” A small, genuine smile this time. “Quoting Sartre while eating pot noodles.”
“Sartre didn’t have to deal with noodle pots,” Rory said. “He’d have written a lot less if he did.”
Niamh chuckled, then the sound caught and thinned. “I missed you,” she said, too casually to be casual.
Rory’s hand went to her wrist, thumb tracing the old crescent scar. “You missed the idea of me.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Rory forced herself to meet her eyes. “You missed who I was when things were good. Before it all went… before I let it all go wrong. And I—” Her voice faltered. She swallowed. “I missed you too. In very specific, selfish ways. Like when I couldn’t remember how to fill in a form or didn’t know what the law actually said about restraining orders and thought, ‘Niamh would know.’ And then I hated myself for thinking it because I’d made sure you weren’t there.”
Niamh’s face softened at the word. “Did you—?”
“It’s over,” Rory said, briefly, firmly. “He’s… another life. One I haven’t quite forgiven myself for surviving.” She let out a laugh that hurt. “And there it is. That’s why I don’t go to reunions.”
A siren wailed faintly somewhere distant, rising and falling.
Niamh leaned against the opposite wall, mirroring Rory’s pose. Their breath smoked between them like faint signals. “I’m not here for a reunion,” she said. “I came in because my boss heard this place does decent whiskey.” She hesitated. “I’m glad I did.”
Rory didn’t know what to do with that. Gratitude? Anger? The temptation to rewind five years and rewrite every choice between then and now? All of it sat heavy and unsayable on her tongue.
“Do you ever think about it?” Niamh asked. “The other version? If you hadn’t left? If you’d…” She motioned vaguely at Rory’s life. The bar, the alley, the invisible tower blocks of what-ifs.
“Every time I hear someone say ‘objection’ on telly,” Rory said lightly . Then, more quietly: “And sometimes when I’m delivering chow mein to some fancy address and I see casebooks on the shelf through the door.”
Niamh nodded. “I think about it when I’m stuck in a meeting about whether we can word a clause so the client never has to pay tax anywhere, ever. I think: Rory would have told them to shove it. Rory would have—”
“Rory would have done what she was paid to do,” Rory said. “We’re not saints. We’re just girls who liked arguing.”
“Were,” Niamh said.
“Were,” Rory agreed.
They let the word hang. Past tense, another country.
“Nem!” a voice yelled faintly from inside. Muffled through two doors, but clear enough. “You dead out there or what?”
Niamh rolled her eyes. “Duty calls. Rich men need saving.”
“And I’ve got to get back to overcharging them for craft beer,” Rory said.
They stayed where they were for another beat, though. Neither quite moving.
“Can I—” Niamh began, then stopped. “I don’t know if I have the right to ask.”
“Ask,” Rory said.
“Can we… not do the disappearing thing again?” Niamh’s hands had bunched in her coat pockets. “I’m not saying we go back to shared essays and all-nighters. I just… If you need a thing proofread. Or just proofing you exist,” she added, with a small, crooked smile. “I’m around. I live in Camden. I’m on all the usual surveillance platforms.”
Rory’s first instinct was to retreat. To protect the careful scaffolding of her current life, the routine built on knowing who came and went. Old doors were drafty; they let in all kinds of weather.
But in front of her, Niamh’s earnestness was so naked it almost hurt to look at.
“Numbers haven’t changed,” Rory said, which was true. She just hadn’t used it. “Yours?”
“New one.” Niamh fished out her phone, the screen bright against the dim alley. “Give me yours. I’ll text you. No pressure. You can ignore it for three years if you like. I’m clearly trained to handle that.”
Rory recited her number. A moment later, her own tired smartphone buzzed in her back pocket. She didn’t look at the message. Just felt the weight of it. Evidence in her jeans.
“Alright,” Niamh said. “I should go pretend to enjoy talking about leveraged buyouts.”
“And I should go rescue my boss from your boss,” Rory said. “He looks polite but he’s vicious after ten.”
“Figures you’d find a father figure who’s a bartender,” Niamh teased, then seemed to hear her own words and winced. “Sorry, that was—”
“Accurate,” Rory said, with a small grin. “Go on. Before they send a search party.”
Niamh hesitated, then stepped forward and, very briefly, hugged her. It was awkward around the angles of their lives and the bulk of their coats. For a second Rory smelled her perfume—something expensive and citrusy, a far cry from the shared body spray of halls days. Then Niamh was already pulling back.
“Don’t disappear,” she said, soft but fierce.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rory replied.
It was the closest she could get to a promise.
She watched Niamh walk back down the corridor, the set of her shoulders so different from the girl who’d once danced on kitchen counters, the same in ways that made Rory’s jaw ache with nostalgia. When the door swung shut behind her, the muffled thump of bass and voices rushed in, then settled again into the steady bar hum.
Rory stayed in the alley for a moment longer. The cold bit at her fingers, numbing the scar on her wrist until it was just skin again. She tilted her head back, looked up at the slice of sky framed by brick.
There was no rewind. No neat chapter break between who she’d been and who she was. Just this—Tuesday night, neon buzz, old ghosts walking into the bar and ordering gin.
Silas was restocking glasses when she came back behind the counter. His limp was more pronounced now, and he moved a fraction slower. He didn’t ask. He just slid a glass toward her and started filling it with ice.
“Looks like you saw one,” he said. “Ghost, I mean.”
“Something like that,” Rory said.
He studied her face for a second, then nodded toward the lime wedges. “Hands,” he said. “Work’s good for them.”
She reached for the fruit, the knife. The rhythm returned—slice, twist, drop. Outside, the raven glowed steady and green, painting the faces of passersby who would never know that, inside, two timelines had briefly touched and then moved on in their separate directions.
At the far table, Niamh laughed at something one of her colleagues said. It sounded different now, to Rory’s ears. Older. But still hers.
Rory finished garnishing a drink and set it down with a practiced, easy motion. Then she lifted her own phone under the bar, thumb hovering over the unread message.
After a moment, she opened it.
It was nothing dramatic. Just her name, spelled properly, and a stupid little waving hand emoji that Niamh would have once mocked. Underneath, a line: “In case you forget I’m real.”
Rory stared at it until someone cleared their throat for a refill. She tucked the phone away.
The weight of time didn’t lift. It shifted, making room.