Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQR7HJR50F1STYFA2F34GG

The green neon glow of The Raven's Nest sign caught the rain and threw it back in emerald streaks against the wet pavement. Rory ducked under the awning, shaking droplets from her black hair, and pushed through the heavy wooden door into the familiar warmth of whiskey-scented air and low conversation. She hadn't planned on coming down tonight. The delivery shift had ended hours ago, and she'd spent most of the evening in her flat above the bar, listening to the muffled bass of whatever vinyl Silas had chosen for the evening crowd. But the walls had started to press in around ten o'clock, the way they sometimes did when the rain wouldn't stop and her thoughts kept circling back to things she'd rather not examine. So she'd pulled on her jacket and taken the back stairs down, telling herself she just wanted a drink and maybe a few words with Silas if he wasn't too busy. The bar was half-full, the usual Thursday crowd claiming their usual spots beneath the old maps and faded photographs that covered every inch of wall space. Rory made her way toward the corner of the bar where Silas stood polishing a glass, his silver signet ring catching the dim light with each rotation of his wrist. He nodded at her approach, hazel eyes crinkling at the corners. "Thought you were in for the night," he said, reaching for the bottle of Jameson without being asked. "Changed my mind." She slid onto a stool, absently rubbing the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. "Pour it neat?" "As if I'd insult you with ice." He set the glass in front of her and leaned against the back counter, his slight limp evident as he shifted his weight off his left leg. "You've got that look." "What look?" "The one that says you're thinking too loud." He tapped his temple. "Dangerous habit, that." Rory lifted the whiskey but didn't drink, letting the amber warmth hover near her lips. "Just the rain. Makes me—" She stopped. Her bright blue eyes had caught movement near the entrance, a figure stepping through the door, shaking off the weather. Something in the way the woman moved—the particular tilt of her shoulders, the way she tucked her chin while scanning the room—sent a jolt through Rory's chest. No. It couldn't be. But then the woman turned, and their eyes met across the length of the bar, and Rory felt something inside her freeze and shatter simultaneously. Margot Sinclair looked nothing like she had five years ago. The wild copper curls that Rory remembered had been cut short and severe, close to the skull. The softness was gone from her face, replaced by angles that hadn't been there before, cheekbones sharp enough to cast shadows in the bar's dim light. She'd lost weight—too much weight, Rory thought—and there was something in her posture that spoke of exhaustion held at bay through sheer will. But it was her eyes that hit hardest. Margot's eyes had always been warm, honey-brown and quick to laugh. The eyes looking at Rory now held that same color but none of that warmth. They were the eyes of someone who had seen things they couldn't unsee. For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then Margot's mouth curved into something that might have been a smile if it had reached anywhere near those changed eyes. "Rory Carter." Her voice was rougher than it used to be, as if she'd spent the intervening years speaking too little or screaming too much. "Of all the bars in all of London." Rory set down her untouched whiskey with a hand that wasn't quite steady. "Margot." The name felt strange in her mouth, like a word from a language she'd once been fluent in but had since forgotten. She watched Margot approach, cataloging the changes—the new lines at the corners of her eyes, the way she held her left arm slightly closer to her body than her right, the absence of the silver pendant she used to wear at her throat. "May I?" Margot gestured to the empty stool beside Rory. "Of course." Silas materialized with the quiet efficiency of a man who had spent decades reading rooms and knowing when to disappear. He set a glass of water in front of Margot without comment and withdrew to the far end of the bar, busying himself with customers who didn't need attending. "You've changed," Rory said, then immediately wished she could take the words back. They hung in the air between them, too obvious, too loaded. Margot lifted the water glass and took a slow sip. "So have you. Though—" She tilted her head, studying Rory with an intensity that felt almost clinical. "Less than I expected, considering." "Considering what?" "Everything." Margot set the glass down. "I heard about Evan. About you leaving Cardiff." The name hit Rory like a physical blow. She covered it by picking up her whiskey again, taking a long swallow this time, letting the burn spread through her chest. "News travels." "It does when you know who to ask." Margot's fingers traced the condensation on her glass, leaving trails in the moisture. "I'm glad you got out." "Are you?" Rory heard the edge in her own voice and didn't try to soften it. "Funny. I don't remember getting any calls. Any letters. Any indication that you were glad about anything to do with me." Margot was quiet for a moment. The rain beat against the windows in the silence, and somewhere behind them, someone fed coins into the ancient jukebox, and Nina Simone's voice began to unspool through the smoky air. "You're right," Margot said finally. "I disappeared. I owe you an explanation for that." "Do you?" Rory turned on her stool to face Margot fully, her jaw tight. "Because I spent six months trying to find you, Margot. Six months. After graduation, after everything we—" She stopped, struggling to keep her voice level. "You just vanished. No goodbye, no forwarding address, nothing. Eva told me you'd left the country. Your mum said you'd taken a job overseas but couldn't say where. I thought—" She broke off, unable to say what she'd thought. That Margot was dead. That something terrible had happened. That their plans—the flat they'd talked about sharing, the life they'd sketched out in late-night conversations—had been meaningless to Margot in a way Rory had never suspected. "I know," Margot said. Her voice was soft now, stripped of its earlier roughness. "I know what you thought. I know what my silence cost you. Cost us." She reached out, her fingers hovering over Rory's wrist, close to the crescent scar but not quite touching. "I couldn't tell you where I was going because I didn't know. And I couldn't tell you why because I'd signed things that made it very clear what would happen if I talked." Rory stared at her. "What are you saying?" "I'm saying that five years ago, I was recruited for something. Something I can't discuss, even now." Margot's eyes flicked toward Silas at the far end of the bar, then back to Rory. "Your landlord there would understand, if you ever asked him about Prague." A cold feeling settled in Rory's stomach. She glanced at Silas, at the way he stood with his weight on his good leg, polishing the same glass he'd been polishing for five minutes, his attention carefully not on them. "You—" She turned back to Margot. "You're like him?" "Was." The word came out flat, definitive. "Past tense. Very past tense." Margot lifted her water glass again, and Rory noticed for the first time that her hand was trembling, almost imperceptibly. "I'm out now. Have been for eight months. Medical discharge." "Medical?" Rory's eyes swept over Margot again, seeing the thinness, the careful way she held her left arm, the exhaustion carved into every line of her face. "Margot, what happened to you?" "Things I can't talk about." Margot smiled, and this time there was a ghost of warmth in it—a flicker of the woman Rory remembered. "Things I wouldn't want to talk about even if I could. But I'm here now. I came back to London specifically because—" She hesitated. "Because I needed to see if there was anything left of the person I used to be. And you were part of that person, Rory. A big part." Rory felt something shift in her chest, some wall she'd built over years of wondering and hurting starting to crack. "You should have found a way to tell me. Something. Anything." "I know." "I mourned you." Her voice broke slightly on the word. "I mourned you like you were dead, and you were just—what? Running around doing spy things? Pretending I never existed?" "Never that." Margot's hand finally made contact, her fingers curling gently around Rory's wrist, warm against the raised line of her scar. "Never pretending. There were nights—" She stopped, swallowed hard. "There were nights when remembering you was the only thing that kept me human. When I would lie awake and think about that summer after third year, when we drove to Cornwall and stayed in that terrible hostel with the broken heating, and you made me laugh so hard I cried." Rory remembered. She remembered everything about that trip—the sound of Margot's laughter, the way the ocean looked at dawn, the feeling that her whole life was opening up in front of her like a road with no end. "We were going to get a flat together," she said quietly. "You were going to teach, and I was going to do something that wasn't law. We had it all figured out." "We had nothing figured out." Margot's grip tightened briefly. "We were children. Beautiful, stupid children who thought the world was simple." She released Rory's wrist and picked up her water glass again, draining it. "The world isn't simple. I learned that the hard way." "And now?" Margot was quiet for a long moment, her eyes fixed on the old map of London that hung above the bar, yellowed and water-stained, marking a city that no longer existed. "Now I'm trying to figure out what comes next," she said finally. "I have a flat in Brixton. I have a therapist who's very patient with me. I have about a thousand hours of missed sleep to catch up on." She turned to look at Rory, and for just a moment, something of the old Margot surfaced—vulnerable, hopeful, afraid. "And I have a lot of people I owe apologies to. You're at the top of that list." Rory signaled to Silas for another whiskey. When he brought it, she asked him to pour one for Margot too, ignoring her protest about not drinking anymore. Silas set both glasses down and withdrew again, ghost-like in his discretion. "I'm not ready to forgive you," Rory said carefully, pushing one glass toward Margot. "Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time." Margot nodded, accepting this. "But I'm not going to pretend I don't want to understand." Rory lifted her own glass. "I live upstairs, you know. Above this bar. If you wanted to come back sometime. Talk more. Not just apologize, but actually talk." Something loosened in Margot's face—a tension Rory hadn't realized was there until it was gone. She reached for the whiskey, held it up toward Rory in a silent toast. "I'd like that," she said. They sat together in the rain-drummed quiet, two women who had been girls together, separated by half a decade of silence and secrets, and began the slow work of learning who they had become.