Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQVQ13RZCWR91PB4GRP2DW

The green neon sign cast its sickly light across the wet pavement, turning the rain into something venomous. Rory shouldered through the door of The Raven's Nest with her delivery bag still slung across her back, the thermal pouch empty now, smelling of garlic and black bean sauce. She was supposed to go straight upstairs—up the narrow staircase at the back, through the door with the sticky lock, into the flat where her shoes lived in a pile by the radiator and her law textbooks gathered dust on a shelf she never looked at. But the cold had gotten into her bones during that last run to Covent Garden, and she wanted something warm that wasn't tea. The bar was quiet for a Thursday. A few regulars hunched over their drinks in the amber gloom, faces half-lit by the wall sconces that Silas kept deliberately dim. He said it was atmosphere. Rory suspected it was cheaper than replacing the bulbs. She dropped onto a stool at the far end of the bar, peeled off her wet jacket, and caught Silas's eye. He limped over, polishing a glass with a cloth that had seen better decades. "You look like a drowned thing." "Charming. Can I get a whiskey? Irish, if you've got it." "I've always got it." He reached for the Jameson without looking, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the light. "Rough night?" "Just wet." She wrapped both hands around the glass when he set it down, letting the warmth seep into her fingers. Behind Silas, the old maps on the wall seemed to ripple in the low light—trade routes, coastlines, borders that no longer existed. She'd asked him once why he kept them up. He'd said something about reminding himself that nothing stays where you put it. She was halfway through the whiskey when the door opened behind her. She didn't turn around. People came and went from The Raven's Nest all evening; it was the nature of the place. But she heard the footsteps pause—not the hesitation of someone checking their phone or shaking off an umbrella, but the full-body arrest of someone who has seen something they weren't prepared for. "Rory?" The voice found her like a hand reaching through years of silence to grip her by the back of the neck. She knew it before she turned. Knew it the way she knew her own middle name or the particular creak of the third stair in her parents' house in Cardiff. But when she swiveled on the stool, the face attached to the voice was wrong. Not wrong. Changed. Niamh Gallagher stood just inside the door, rain-damp and wide-eyed, looking like she'd walked into the wrong life and found the right person in it. She was thinner than Rory remembered—not thin in the way of someone who ran or dieted, but thin in the way of someone who'd been slowly pared down by something invisible. Her red hair, which had once fallen in chaotic curls past her shoulders, was cropped close to her skull, and the bones of her face stood out with a severity that made her green eyes enormous. She wore an expensive coat—camel-colored, probably cashmere—that hung on her like it had been bought for a different body. A body she'd since vacated. "Niamh." Rory said the name like a question, even though it wasn't one. She set her glass down. "Jesus. Niamh." "I can't believe—" Niamh started, then stopped, pressing her lips together in that way she always had when she was trying not to cry. She crossed the bar in five quick steps and pulled Rory into a hug that was all angles and sharpness, her collarbone a blade against Rory's shoulder. She smelled like expensive perfume and, underneath it, something antiseptic. Rory held on for a beat longer than she meant to, then pulled back and looked at her. Really looked. Three years. Three years since the last time they'd been in the same room, at Eva's birthday party in that terrible karaoke bar in Brixton. Niamh had been luminous that night, flushed with wine and something else—a wildness that made people orbit her without understanding why. She'd sung "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac with her eyes closed and her shoes off, and Rory had watched from a corner booth and thought, not for the first time, that Niamh Gallagher was the kind of person who burned through life so brightly that she'd leave scorch marks on everyone around her. The woman standing in front of her now was not luminous. She was translucent. "Sit down," Rory said. "What are you drinking?" "I shouldn't—" Niamh glanced toward the door, then back at Rory, and something in her expression crumbled. "Gin and tonic. Please." Silas materialized with the drink before Rory even had to ask. He had that quality—an instinct for when a conversation needed lubrication and when it needed privacy. He set the gin down, gave Rory a look that said nothing and everything, and limped toward the far end of the bar where a man in a tweed jacket was trying to get his attention. Niamh slid onto the stool beside Rory and wrapped her fingers around the glass the same way Rory had wrapped hers around the whiskey. Mirror gestures. Old habits. They used to joke that they'd been separated at birth—Rory with her black hair and blue eyes, Niamh all red and green, like two halves of something Celtic and half-feral. They'd met at fourteen, at a school debating competition in Dublin where Rory had argued against the death penalty with a ferocity that startled the judges and Niamh had heckled her from the third row until they were both thrown out. That felt like someone else's story now. "Three years," Rory said. "I know." Niamh took a sip of her gin. Her hand trembled, and she set the glass down quickly, as if hoping Rory hadn't noticed. "I kept meaning to call. I'd get as far as pulling up your number, and then I'd just—" She waved a hand vaguely. "I don't know. I couldn't figure out what to say." "You could have said anything. You could have said hello." "Hello is the hardest word, Rory. Everyone thinks it's goodbye, but it's not." Rory turned the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist without thinking, the pad of her right thumb tracing the familiar ridge. A nervous habit. "What happened to you?" Niamh's smile was a brittle thing, all surface and no warmth. "How much time do you have?" "I live upstairs." That surprised a real laugh out of her—short, startled, the ghost of the laugh Rory remembered. "Of course you do. You always did end up in the strangest places." "Says the woman who once lived in a converted church in Galway." "That was romantic. This is—" Niamh looked around The Raven's Nest, taking in the maps, the photographs, the shelves of books along the back wall that Rory knew concealed the door to Silas's hidden room. "This is actually wonderful, in a haunted sort of way. Who's the man behind the bar?" "Silas. He's my landlord. And my boss, sort of. It's complicated." "Everything with you is complicated." Niamh said it gently, but there was a weight under the words, a gravity that hadn't been there before. They sat in silence for a moment. On the wall behind them, a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a headscarf stared out from what looked like a bombed-out street in some Eastern European city. Rory had studied it a hundred times. She still didn't know who the woman was or why Silas kept her picture up. "I got married," Niamh said. She said it the way someone might say I got diagnosed. Flat. Clinical. "I heard. Eva told me. Patrick something?" "Patrick Holt. Barrister. Your father would have loved him." The bitterness in her voice was sharp enough to cut. "Everyone's father loved Patrick. He was very lovable, in public." Rory felt something cold settle in her stomach. She knew that cadence. She knew the particular way a woman's voice went flat and careful when she was describing a man who had shown her one face and the world another. She knew it because she'd heard it in her own voice, once, when she'd told Eva about Evan—the careful, almost clinical recitation of facts, as if naming the thing precisely enough might strip it of its power. "Niamh." "Don't." Niamh held up a hand. "Don't do the voice. I can handle anything except the voice." "What voice?" "The one where you sound like you understand. Because I know you do, and that makes it worse." The rain picked up outside, drumming against the windows. Somewhere in the back, Silas dropped something—a glass, maybe—and swore softly. The bar's radiator ticked and hissed in the corner like a living thing. "I left him," Niamh said after a while. "Seven months ago. It took me two years to leave and seven months to start feeling like I'd actually done it. I sold the house in Kensington. I've been staying in hotels, mostly. I was walking past this bar and I thought—" She stopped. "I don't know what I thought. That it looked warm." "It is warm. Silas keeps the radiators on full blast. He says cold people don't drink enough." Niamh smiled again, and this time it was closer to real. "He sounds like my grandmother." Rory turned on her stool so she was facing Niamh fully. Up close, she could see the faint discoloration under her left eye—not a bruise, not anymore, but the memory of one, the way skin holds onto damage long after the color fades. She could see the new sharpness of Niamh's jaw, the tendons standing out on the back of her hands. She could see that the expensive coat had been bought in better times and kept out of loyalty or stubbornness or the simple inability to throw anything else away. "You could have called me," Rory said again, softer this time. "Any time. Two in the morning. I would have picked up." "I know you would have. That's exactly why I didn't." "That doesn't make any sense." "It makes perfect sense, and you know it." Niamh turned the gin glass in a slow circle on the bar top. "You got away from yours. You rebuilt everything. Eva told me—new city, new life, the whole thing. I couldn't call you in the middle of the night and drag you back into that. You deserved to be free of it." "That's not how friendship works." "No. It's how shame works." The word landed between them like a stone dropped into still water. Rory watched the ripples move through Niamh's expression—the tightening around her mouth, the way her eyes went bright and glassy, the fierce clench of her jaw as she willed herself not to break. Rory reached out and covered Niamh's hand with her own. She didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that Niamh didn't already know, nothing that wouldn't sound like platitude or pity. So she just held on, the way Niamh had held onto her in that Brixton karaoke bar three years ago, when Rory had stepped outside for air and found herself shaking against the wall, and Niamh had appeared beside her and simply taken her hand without asking why. They sat like that for a long time. The bar murmured around them. Silas moved through his quiet circuits, refilling glasses, wiping surfaces, never once glancing their way with anything that could be mistaken for curiosity. He knew, Rory thought, the geometry of private pain—how it occupied space, how it demanded room. Finally, Niamh turned her hand over and squeezed Rory's fingers. "I don't have anywhere to go tonight," she said. It wasn't a request. It was a confession. "Yes you do," Rory said. "You're going upstairs. The couch is terrible, but the lock works, and I'll make you toast in the morning." Niamh closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet, and she didn't bother to pretend otherwise. "Hello, Rory," she said quietly. "Hello, Niamh." Outside, the green neon sign buzzed and flickered against the rain, casting its strange light on the pavement where two sets of footprints were already dissolving.