Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR643YF44SJZV6W00F9GKW

The green neon of The Raven’s Nest buzzed against the gathering dark, a persistent electric hum that matched the static in Rory’s skull. She sat at the far end of the oak bar, her left hand wrapped around a pint of amber ale that had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago. The crescent-shaped scar on her wrist peeked from beneath her sleeve, pale and silver against her skin, a permanent reminder of a Cardiff garden gate and a childhood she could no longer fully trust in memory. Above her, the walls pressed close with their cartography of old wars—faded maps of Prague, Belgrade, black-and-white photographs of men in fedoras who had likely died in ditches long before she was born. Silas moved behind the bar with the economical grace of a man who had learned to compensate for pain. His left leg dragged slightly, the knee injury from Prague decades ago still dictating his geography. He polished a tumbler with a white cloth, his silver signet ring catching the low light, grey-streaked auburn hair falling across his forehead as he worked. He didn’t ask if she wanted another drink. He knew she wasn’t here for the beer. The door opened, admitting a draft of November air and the wet smell of Soho after rain. Rory didn’t look up immediately. She was counting the rings on the bar’s surface, tracing the grain with her thumbnail, practicing the breathing technique she’d learned in the six months since she’d fled Evan’s flat in Cathays—the one where the walls had seemed to shrink every time she spoke too loudly. In, hold, out. The door clicked shut. High heels crossed the floorboards, a sound too sharp, too expensive for the usual afternoon crowd of failed actors and off-duty cab drivers. “Rory?” The voice stopped her breath mid-cycle. It carried the lilt of the Valleys, polished now, smoothed out by elocution lessons and ambition, but unmistakable. Rory’s shoulders tightened. She turned her head slowly, her straight black hair swinging against her jaw. Imogen stood three feet away, poised beneath the green neon like a creature from a different taxonomy entirely. She wore a camel-colored cashmere coat that probably cost more than Rory made in three months delivering Sichuan beef up five flights of stairs. Her hair was shorter now, a sleek bob that ended precisely at her jawline, and she carried a leather portfolio pressed against her ribs as though it contained state secrets. But her eyes were the same—hazel, sharp, capable of dissecting a contract or a friendship with equal precision. “It is you,” Imogen said. A statement, not a question, though her voice tilted upward at the end, betraying uncertainty. Rory forced her fingers to relax around the pint glass. “Imogen.” They stared at each other across the gulf of three years. Three years since Rory had left her Pre-Law textbooks scattered across their shared kitchen table in the student house on Colum Road, since she’d taken only what fit in a rucksack and caught the first train to Paddington while Evan was at the gym. Three years of silence, of deleted social media, of carefully maintained absences. “You’re... here,” Imogen said, stepping closer. Her heels clicked once, twice, then stopped. She seemed to realize the inadequacy of the observation and flushed slightly, the color high on her cheekbones. “I mean, London. I’d heard—Eva mentioned you’d moved, but she didn’t say where. She said you didn’t want to be found.” Rory felt the weight of Silas’s attention from behind the bar, subtle but present, the guardian instinct of the retired operative never fully dormant. She pulled her sleeve down to cover the scar, a reflex she hadn’t yet unlearned. “I’m upstairs,” Rory said, gesturing vaguely toward the ceiling with her chin. “Flat above the bar. I work for—” She stopped, the words sticking. She delivered takeaway for Yu-Fei Cheung six days a week. She lived in a studio with water stains on the ceiling and a lock she’d changed three times. “I’m here,” she finished flatly. Imogen’s gaze traveled over her, cataloguing the differences. The Rory she had known at Cardiff had worn pressed blouses and carried color-coded highlighters, had argued tort law with professors over afternoon tea, had been groomed since birth for the Inns of Court like her father before her. This Rory wore faded denim and a thermal shirt under a jacket that smelled of sesame oil. She was thinner, harder, her bright blue eyes dulled by a vigilance that never quite slept. “You look different,” Imogen said softly. “So do you,” Rory replied. “You look... successful.” “I’m clerking for Hardwicke Chambers. Commercial litigation.” Imogen said it quickly, as if rushing past the information before it could sound like boasting. She shifted the portfolio to her other arm. “I’m meeting a client nearby. I saw the sign—the green neon. I thought it looked... interesting. Different.” Different. The word hung between them, heavy with everything unsaid. Different like Rory had become different. Different like leaving without a note. Different like the bruises that had bloomed on Rory’s ribs during their second year, which Imogen had pretended not to see, and Rory had pretended were from falling off her bike. Silas limped over, his gait uneven but dignified, the rubber sole of his left shoe scuffing softly against the wood. He set a fresh pint in front of Rory without asking, then turned to Imogen. “Drink?” he asked. His voice was gravel and velvet, the kind of voice that suggested he had once persuaded people to betray their countries. “Gin and tonic, please,” Imogen said. “Bombay, if you have it.” Silas nodded and moved away, leaving them in the pocket of silence that had opened between them like a fissure. “You didn’t say goodbye,” Imogen said. She didn’t look at Rory as she said it, watching instead as Silas poured the gin with steady hands. “Third year. You just... vanished. Your father called me. He thought you might have told me where you were going. He was frantic.” Rory wrapped her fingers around the new pint, cold and sweating. “I couldn’t.” “Because of Evan?” The name landed like a stone in still water. Rory’s throat constricted. She remembered the last time she’d seen Imogen—at a coffee shop near the law library, three days before the end. Imogen had been outlining a moot court argument, her handwriting precise, her future mapped out in blue ink. Rory had sat across from her, wearing long sleeves in May, her wrist throbbing where Evan had gripped it too hard during an argument about a text message from her mother. “I had to disappear,” Rory said. Her voice sounded distant, as though it belonged to someone else. “It was the only way to make it stop.” Imogen turned then, fully, her eyes filling with a complex arithmetic of guilt and grief. “I knew something was wrong. I knew it. But you were always so... controlled. So capable. I thought if you needed help, you’d ask. You were always the strong one, Rory. The one with the plan.” “I had a plan,” Rory said. She looked down at her hands, at the scar, at the rough skin of her knuckles from hauling delivery bags up staircases. “The plan just stopped fitting.” The gin arrived. Imogen took it but didn’t drink, her manicured nails tapping a nervous rhythm against the glass. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For not seeing it. For letting you vanish.” Rory shook her head. “You were busy. You had your own future to worry about. Looks like it worked out.” “Does it?” Imogen’s laugh was sharp, brittle. She looked around the bar, at the maps of cities she would never visit under such desperate circumstances, at Silas who watched them with the impartial patience of a man who had seen every possible permutation of human tragedy. “I spend sixteen hours a day reviewing shipping contracts. I haven’t slept through the night in two years. I’m engaged to a man who thinks my job is ‘cute’ until it interferes with his golf schedule. And I saw you sitting here, with your hair all...” She gestured vaguely. “And you looked peaceful. You looked free.” Rory considered this. She thought of the flat upstairs, small but wholly hers, the locks she controlled, the silence that wasn’t predatory. She thought of Evan’s voice, which had once seemed like protection and then like a cage, and how she no longer flinched when phones rang unexpectedly. “I’m not free,” Rory said carefully. “I’m just... surviving differently.” They drank then, in parallel, the silence between them shifting from jagged to something almost tender, a shared recognition of roads not taken, of the brutal arithmetic of survival. The green neon flickered overhead, casting their faces in intermittent emerald light. “I should go,” Imogen said eventually, though she didn’t move. “My client.” “Yes.” Imogen reached into her portfolio and withdrew a card, ivory and embossed. She slid it across the bar. “If you ever want to... I don’t know. Talk. Or not talk. Have coffee where we don’t mention Cardiff or law or any of it.” Rory looked at the card but didn’t touch it. “I’m not that person anymore, Imogen. The one who knew Latin legal terms and wore blazers. I’m not sure there’s enough common language left.” “Maybe not,” Imogen said. She stood, smoothing her coat, adjusting herself back into the armor of her success. “But we knew each other once. That has to count for something. Even if it’s just... regret.” She turned and walked toward the door, her heels striking the floor with the decisive rhythm of someone who knew exactly where she was going. The bell chimed as she stepped out into the Soho night, leaving behind the scent of expensive perfume and the weight of three years of silence. Rory sat alone with her two pints, the scar on her wrist throbbing with a phantom ache. Silas limped over and removed the empty glasses, his signet ring clinking softly against the rim. “Old ghost?” he asked. “Something like that,” Rory said. She picked up the business card and turned it over in her fingers, then tucked it into her back pocket, not committing to anything, but not discarding it either. Outside, the green neon buzzed on, illuminating the maps of old wars, marking time in electric pulses against the London dark.