AI The rain had come in a thin, steady hush that slicked the pavements and left Soho smelling like metal and old stories. Aurora took the last step down from the narrow staircase and felt the familiar give of the floorboards underfoot. The Raven’s Nest breathed around her: warm, dim, a little conspiratorial. Maps turned amber on the walls under low lamps, black-and-white photographs watched from their frames like witnesses who had learned long ago to keep their mouths shut. Behind the bar, the green neon sign of the raven buzzed faintly and threw a sickle of color across a row of bottles.
Silas glanced up as she slid onto her usual stool at the end. His hazel eyes flicked over her the way they did over every thing, registering and filing away. He had a tea towel over his shoulder and a bottle of rye in his hand, his silver signet ring caught in the light as he turned. The man never forgot to wear that ring . His limp was quieter tonight, more a hitch of rhythm than a pain. He set a coaster down in front of her with the care some people reserved for laying out maps.
“Day treat you kindly?” he asked.
“As it ever does,” she said, because there were orders to run and alleyways to navigate and the rain had a way of making people extra sharp when they opened the door to take their food. She smoothed a strand of black hair behind her ear and glanced at the clock on the far wall. Her bright blue eyes caught the neon reflection and went a little electric. “Ducked two cyclists and one very decisive fox. Got your dumplings in Yu-Fei sent extras.”
“Dumplings,” Silas said, as if it were a code-word. “You’ll be the death of me.”
“You always say that and then you live another year.”
He poured her a soda with lime. It wasn’t that she never drank; she just liked her wits better than the bottom of a glass, and Silas respected that balance with a craft only old spies and good bartenders had. She curled her fingers around the glass, the small crescent scar on her left wrist catching briefly on the condensation. It had been a childhood accident with a wire fence and a dare no one could even remember the thrust of anymore, only that she didn’t back down, even then.
The door opened and let in a slice of the night’s cool. She didn’t look up right away. People were always coming and going, sliding into that glow, names and faces whose stories hung in the air a while and left with them. She lifted the glass, the lime a sour clean hit. When the shoes came close enough to make the bar stool next to her creak, she glanced over out of reflex and saw, impossibly, the long-ago slope of a grin.
“Rory?”
It was a woman’s voice, a little breathless, like she’d been walking fast. The face that went with it had changed its map. The angles were sharper, the hair cut blunt and dark as a raven’s wing, gone was the halo of curls she remembered. The old silver ring in the right nostril was gone . The woman wore a navy suit that had the quiet hang of money and work. There was a slim leather bag at her shoulder, the sort of bag that held precise things. But the eyes—that particular blue-gray, the one that had studied beside her for hours over casebooks and cheap tea—those hadn’t changed.
“Imogen?” Aurora heard her own voice and the years it had been pushed down. Cardiff was in it, under the London edges that clung to her now like a texture.
“Oh my God,” Imogen said, and she laughed, an unsanded thing that came from old days. “It is you.”
Silas’s eyebrows ticked up in the way they did when something interesting happened without his arranging it. He set another coaster down without being asked , his movements easy and unintrusive. “I’ll give you two a minute,” he said, and drifted down the bar, his limp turning down the volume of his presence.
Imogen slid onto the stool. Up close, the suit wasn’t perfect; it was better. It had been worn properly and then thrown on a chair, reached for in a hurry. A pen had leaked a storm-blue line on the inside cuff. She had the city’s hunger on her, visible in the small ways—chewed bottom lip, quick glances at the door as if time might leave without her.
“What are you doing here?” Imogen asked, then caught herself. “No—stupid question, it’s a bar, you’re—Christ, I don’t know what you’re doing anymore.”
Aurora smiled despite the thrum in her chest. “Living upstairs,” she said. “Working. Eating too many dumplings. You?”
“Chambers near Temple,” Imogen said, almost like an apology, as if naming that part of the city acknowledged a gulf. “Criminal. Mostly legal aid. It doesn’t pay, but, you know.” She blew out a breath and it took a wisp of hair away from her forehead. “Listen to me, Jesus. I’m doing that thing where you fill the air so you don’t have to look at the person.”
“We were always good at revision chatter,” Aurora said. “You got really good, then.”
Imogen look ed away for a second, to the maps on the wall, to a photograph of a woman in a hat laughing at something just out of frame. The green neon threw a line of fever down the side of her face. “I thought about you,” she said. “More than I should say. Rory—Aurora—do you still go by—?”
“Rory’s fine.”
“Rory. Okay.” Imogen put her hands flat on the bar as if bracing. Her fingers were ink-stained and the nails bitten to quick moons. “I thought about you. All the time. After you left.”
Aurora took a small sip of soda and let the tartness anchor her. After you left. As if she had stepped out of a room and not a life that had been cutting her to ribbons. “It was… abrupt,” she admitted. “I wasn’t good at—” She gestured in that space between them where words sat. “I wasn’t good at telling the truth then.”
Imogen flinched. “I wasn’t good at seeing it,” she said, and there it was, quick and unvarnished. “I was so in my head about essay plans and making the damn Deans’ List and… I thought you’d tell me if you needed—” She stopped herself. “You didn’t owe me that. But I wish to God I’d knocked down your door.”
Silas drifted back and set a gin and tonic in front of Imogen, placed on the coaster with the same exactness as a man wiring a charge. “On me,” he said. “Only once,” and moved away again, his signet ring flashing as he put a glass on a shelf. Aurora watched him out of habit and affection—the way his quiet authority rearranged rooms.
Imogen stared at the gin, then pushed it gently toward Aurora. “I don’t, not anymore,” she said, and lifted her chin like a challenge and a dare met. “Three years now. I used to wear this place on my nights, you know? Not this place,” with a look around that had respect in it, “but places like it. I thought I was named after a girl who could drink and argue and never sleep. Turns out I was named after a girl who falls apart at the seams if you don’t watch the threads.”
Aurora look ed at her, really look ed, the way she’d once look ed at footnotes, just to see what had been left unsaid. There was something steadier about Imogen now. The suit, the bag, the chewed lip—those rendered a different woman than the one who had missed half their morning lectures and showed up smelling like clubs and lilies. “Three years,” she said softly . “That’s something.”
“It’s every thing, some days,” Imogen said. Her smile twisted and softened. “You’re here. Above a bar.”
“I like the sound of that,” Aurora said, and shrugged a shoulder. “The rent’s cheap. The walls are thin. The people are… interesting.” She thought of Evans and halls and making herself small in rooms that were supposed to be safe. “It feels safe here,” she said, and that was all she was willing to let loose.
Imogen’s eyes sharpened. She had learned something in the years; she listened differently. “Safe,” she echoed , and the word sat between them with manners. “I saw Brendan Carter in Cardiff last Christmas. At that place on the corner with the bad coffee.” She watched Aurora’s face when she said her father’s name, as if checking a pulse. “He look ed… older. I mean, we all do. But he asked after you. He didn’t say it like a barrister. He said it like a dad.”
Aurora look ed down into the fizz and found the bottom. The old ache uncurled, slow and careful. “We don’t speak much,” she said, keeping her voice even. “He had a plan for me. I had a different one. That’s the dullest story in the world.”
“It is and it isn’t,” Imogen said. “Some of us chased the plan because we were afraid of what wasn’t on the page.”
“You chased it,” Aurora said, not unkindly. “You were always better at arguing than anyone in that room.”
Imogen laughed; the sound cracked and mended. “You remember when I couldn’t get through a presentation without look ing like I was going to be sick? You held the bloody cue cards for me."
“You’d have eaten the tutor alive without me,” Aurora said.
“That’s not how I remember it.” Imogen glanced toward the door again, more habit than need. “I take cases now where the girls don’t have words yet. I sit and wait for them to find the plainer ones. Sometimes I think—if I had been like this then. If I had seen—”
“Don’t,” Aurora said. She surprised herself with the force of it, with how quickly she wanted to spare Imogen the weight of it. “You were twenty. I was twenty. We were all pretending to be better than we were at it. And besides, you did enough. You did every thing you knew. We both walked, that’s all.”
For a long second they listened to a Benny Goodman record hiss to life from the old jukebox. Someone at a table in the back laughed too loud and then apologized to the room without look ing up. Outside, a siren wound down the street and ran out of breath. The neon buzzed. Silas flipped a book back into place on the shelf at the far end; the movement was ordinary and not. He disappeared through the trick of the shelf for a count of ten and returned, a tray now in his hands, the bar’s private machinations an old game that Aurora had learned not to ask by name.
“You stayed the same,” Imogen said finally, but there was a question in it.
Aurora look ed at her and thought, you don’t know me. Not anymore. She had left Cardiff with a single knotted bag and her heart thudding like a fist against bars. She had learned this city by its backdoors and the way rain could make a person into mist and then back again. She had learned how to read a face and when to leave and how to fold a life into places other people overlook ed. “I changed,” she said. “Just not into the thing they thought I would.”
Imogen fiddled with a napkin until its edges were knives. “I thought you’d be a barrister,” she said, and smiled sideways at herself. “God, of course I did. It was the only story I knew how to put us in.”
“I thought you’d burn out by twenty-five and go and breed alpacas in Monmouth,” Aurora said, and that unlocked both of their laughter, the real kind, the kind that made the bartender look over with a private half-smile.
“Tempting, sometimes,” Imogen admitted. She sobered. “I am sorry, Rory. For the vanishing. For not—” She gestured helplessly , her hand describing the years and the space. “It’s not that I didn’t care. I’m not sure I knew how to.”
Aurora turned the glass slowly with the heel of her palm. The scar on her wrist glowed pale in the bar’s light, a little crescent moon always on the verge of a new phase. “We were kids,” she said. “He was good at making me quiet. You were good at making me laugh. I picked the wrong gravity to orbit for a while, that’s all.”
“And now?”
“Now,” Aurora said, and felt the word settle like a cat into the present, "I get up. I work. I like the way the city look s at four in the morning. I like knowing the map of who pays in coins and who tips with stories. I like that I can come downstairs and find Silas cleaning a glass he’s already cleaned and telling me to eat dumplings.” She tilted the glass toward Imogen. “And some nights I run into someone who knew me back when.”
Imogen look ed at her for so long that Aurora had to look away to keep from tugging at the invisible string between them. “I missed you,” Imogen said. “We had—” she shook her head, as if the word friendship had acquired rust and would take effort to scrub clean. “We were good. Even when we were bad at being human.”
“Speak for yourself,” Aurora said lightly , and then, softer, “I missed you, too.”
Silas appeared beside them without fanfare. He set a small plate between them—dumplings, steam lifting like hands. “I find food improves reunions,” he said, with his dry little smile. He tapped his ring against the bar once, an old habit like a signature, and faded away.
Imogen picked up one cautiously , as if expecting it to fight back. “Yu-Fei’s?”
“The one and only,” Aurora said. “Don’t burn your mouth.”
“Too late,” Imogen said, around a wince and a laugh. She swallowed and closed her eyes as the heat worked through her. “Worth it.”
They ate, letting the hot little parcels of ginger and pork give their tongues something to do while their brains caught up. The hunger was ridiculous and honest. It smoothed the edges of the evening, put weight in their bodies where it had only been in their heads.
Imogen dabbed her mouth with the corner of a napkin. “Do you—would you—” She faltered, squared herself. “I don’t want to be the person who comes crashing into your life and makes it about me. I’m good at that. But I’m trying to be better. Could we—maybe get coffee? Somewhere not a bar. No expectations. Just… add a page.”
Aurora watched the line of the green neon crawl across the glass and onto Imogen’s cheek. She thought of the years that had tried to harden into a moral and refused. She thought of the girl Imogen had been, sitting cross-legged on their college floor under a tower of notes, ink on her ankles where she’d run out of paper. She thought of waking one morning with her heart beating too loudly and feeling, for the first time, like she might not die of him if she left that day .
She would never go back to that. Some doors stayed closed even when you held the keys. But there were other doors. Smaller, less glamorous, but real.
“Coffee is cheap,” Aurora said. “I can do coffee.”
Imogen let out a breath she had been carrying for longer than their conversation. “Tomorrow? Or is that too forward? Jesus, I never learned how to—"
“Tomorrow’s good,” Aurora said. “I’ve got an eleven to noon delivery window in Bloomsbury. After?”
“After,” Imogen echoed , and the word had a small, bright weight .
Silas slid the bill under the plate, a ceremonial gesture because Aurora had a tab and Imogen’s gin sat untasted. He lingered long enough to meet Aurora’s eye and tip his head in the almost-nod that meant, You all right? She gave him the small return lift of her chin that told him he could stop worrying. His ring flashed once as he took the cash from someone at the far end, his limp a quiet underscore to the music.
They drifted into pleasantries because that was what you did at the end of something and the start of something else. Imogen’s landlord was a crook; Aurora’s upstairs sink made a sound like a frog; Imogen knew a locksmith; Aurora knew a man who knew several. They traded numbers with a care that felt like setting down new glassware.
When Imogen stood, she hesitated, one hand on the back of the stool, as if coming untethered. “I really am glad I saw you,” she said.
“Me too,” Aurora said, and they both knew how many stories sat behind those two words, their backs against the wall, smoking, refusing to be neat.
Imogen turned her collar up against the rain and went to the door. The neon made a halo on her shoulder as she pushed it open and the night took her. Aurora watched the shape of her in the glass for a few beats more than necessary. Then she picked up the last dumpling and ate it slowly , thinking about maps.
Silas came to rest near her, his hip against the wood, the old habit of a man who had leaned on a lot of counters in a lot of cities. “Old friend?” he asked, as if he didn’t already have a skeleton of the story.
“Old friend,” Aurora said.
He nodded, approving or simply acknowledging the inevitability of return. He tapped his ring once, twice. “Funny thing about time,” he said. “It doesn’t ask you first, but it does let you answer back if you’re stubborn.”
Aurora look ed up at him and smiled. “How’s your knee?”
“Affronted by stairs and inclement weather,” he said. “But otherwise, it soldiers on.”
He moved away, then, and tended to a spill as if nothing in the room had shifted. The Benny Goodman ran out and the silence that followed wasn’t empty. The rain thickened for a few moments and then relaxed into its steady thread. Aurora finished her soda, the lime soft now, and set the empty glass exactly on the ring of the coaster, because it made a kind of rightness in a world that didn’t bother with much.
When she climbed the stairs later, the wood complained under her weight the way it had complained under Imogen’s a lifetime ago. Upstairs, the thin walls would talk about other people’s lives. The room would smell faintly of ginger. She would lie down and watch the lime slice of the neon move across her ceiling and cut into darker and lighter areas, like hands opening. Somewhere below, Silas would lock the front, his ring a final note against the bolt. She would palm her phone. Tomorrow would be in it, a small dot on a map she hadn’t planned for, and she would go toward it.