Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR1W15YS3BTJ8GC5E939Q2

The Raven's Nest smelled like it always had—stale beer soaked into floorboards, the ghost of a thousand cigarettes despite the smoking ban, and something underneath that Rory could never quite place. Oakmoss, maybe. Or time itself, distilled and served neat. She'd come in for the back room, ostensibly to discuss a delivery route that had gone sideways. Silas had texted her an hour ago: *Need you. Twenty minutes.* She'd left the Golden Empress with two uneaten dim sum containers and a muttered apology to Yu-Fei. The woman barely looked up from her ledger. The bar was empty except for a figure hunched over a whisky at the far end of the counter. Rory's stomach did something unpleasant. She knew that posture, that particular slump of the shoulders. She'd seen it in a thousand memories she'd spent years learning not to revisit. "Marcus?" The man turned. For a moment, he didn't register her at all. Then his eyes widened—that pale grey she remembered from university, from late-night study sessions in the library, from kisses behind the botany building when she was someone else entirely. "Rory?" His voice came out rough. "Christ. Is that actually you?" It was and wasn't. The Marcus Thorne she'd known had been all restless energy and ambitious angles—a law student with a scholarship and something to prove. This Marcus was thinner, worn down like a stone in a river. His hair, once carefully styled, fell limp across his forehead, streaked with grey at the temples. He couldn't have been more than thirty-two, but he looked forty. "Hello," she said carefully. The distance between them felt less like space and more like a decision she'd have to make with every step. "I didn't know you were—" He stopped, studying her face like he was trying to match it against some earlier version stored in his memory. "How long has it been?" "Seven years," Rory said. She didn't have to think about it. Some things were permanent, etched into your timeline like scars. "Since second year." Marcus laughed, a sound like gravel in a disposal. "Seven years. Jesus." He gestured at the empty stool next to him. "Can you sit? For a minute? I'm not going to—I just. It's been a long time." Silas emerged from the back room and saw her standing there. His hazel eyes flicked between them with the precision of someone who'd spent his life reading rooms. He nodded once—a permission or perhaps an acknowledgment—and disappeared back through the bookshelf door. Rory pulled out the stool. "What are you doing in London?" she asked. "What am I doing?" Marcus turned his glass slowly on the bar, his fingers still wrapped around it like it might float away. "That's generous. More like, what am I doing anywhere? I'm working for a firm in Canary Wharf. Contract law. It's terrible and it pays well enough. I drink too much on weeknights and barely at all on weekends, which doesn't make sense." He stopped himself, ran a hand over his face. "Sorry. I'm rambling. What about you? Still at Cardiff?" "No." Rory watched the bartender—someone new she didn't recognize—move with practiced efficiency at the other end of the counter. "I left university. Didn't finish." She expected surprise, maybe judgment. Instead, Marcus just nodded like she'd confirmed something he'd suspected all along. "Yeah, that doesn't surprise me, actually." "What doesn't surprise you?" "That you got out." He finally looked at her directly. "I used to think you'd be the one who'd make it out. You know? You were always the smartest person in any room, but you were also the only one who seemed to realize that mattered less than you thought it did. Everyone else was so desperate to succeed at the thing we were supposed to succeed at. You already knew it was bullshit." Rory felt something tighten in her chest. This wasn't Marcus. Or it was, but it was Marcus after someone had moved all his furniture and painted the walls a different color. The person she'd known had been convinced of the opposite—that achievement was everything, that the law was a noble pursuit, that they'd both spend their lives climbing. "What happened to you?" she asked. She meant it kindly, but it came out sharp. He took a drink. His hand trembled slightly, she noticed. "Life. Adulthood. Take your pick." The glass returned to the bar with a hollow clink. "I made partner two years ago. Youngest one at the firm. That was supposed to be the goal, right? We all talked about it. Making partner. Making money. Making something of ourselves." He laughed again, that same grinding sound. "I don't even like the law anymore, Rory. I haven't for years. But I'm too deep in to stop. Too comfortable. Too scared." "Of what?" "Of being nobody. Of proving my mother right about the scholarship being a fluke. Of finding out that I'm just... ordinary." He looked at his hands. "I used to dream about you, you know. Years after we stopped talking. You'd be somewhere impossible—the moon, or inside a book—and you'd turn to me and ask me what I was afraid of. And I could never answer." Rory didn't remember any of this Marcus. Or rather, she remembered a different version—the one from before everything broke. That Marcus had loved her or thought he did. He'd been possessive in the way ambitious people sometimes are, seeing potential in others as a reflection of their own worth. She'd been young enough not to recognize it for what it was. "I'm not who I was," she said quietly. "Neither am I." Marcus's grey eyes were wet now. "But at least you got out. You're here, you're... you're alive. You look alive. I feel like I've been sleepwalking for a decade." The silence stretched between them, filled with all the versions of their lives they hadn't lived together. All the paths that had diverged, never to converge again. She could feel the weight of it—the actual physical heaviness of years passing, of becoming someone your younger self wouldn't recognize, of standing in front of someone you used to love and being unable to quite locate the feeling anymore. "You could stop," Rory said. "The law, the firm. You could walk away." Marcus smiled sadly. "So could I. We're all full of could-dos, aren't we? That's what I've learned. It's not the doing that's hard. It's living with the not-doing. All those could-haves become ghosts that follow you around." Silas materialized at the other end of the bar, ostensibly reorganizing bottles. But Rory knew he was close enough to intervene if things went sideways. That was his job—had always been his job, even before he'd hired her and given her a room upstairs and taught her that the world was far more complicated than Pre-Law had suggested. "I have to go," Rory said. "Silas probably needs—" "One more minute?" Marcus held up a hand. "I know I don't have a right to ask. But one more minute?" She nodded. "I'm glad you're okay," he said. "Really. I used to worry about you. After everything. And I'm glad you're okay." Rory stood up slowly. She reached across the space between them and squeezed his shoulder once, brief and final. He was skin and bone under his jacket, worn down to his framework. "You could be okay too," she said. "If you wanted." "Maybe." He turned back to his whisky. "That feels very far away right now." She left him there among the maps and photographs, a man suspended between the person he'd been and whoever he might still become. Silas was waiting at the bookshelf door, holding it open. As she passed through into the back room, she caught her reflection in the mirror above the bar—bright blue eyes, black hair, the small crescent scar on her wrist visible as she pushed her sleeve up. She looked like someone who had made a choice. The question that would haunt her now was whether that made her braver or just luckier than the man she'd left behind.