Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRA3FV51PG1WX3YA8NYCGX

The green neon sign above The Raven's Nest hummed its low electric hymn into the Soho evening. Rory balanced a cardboard tray of takeaway containers against her hip, fishing for the side-door key that would take her upstairs, when she heard the voice. "Aurora bloody Carter." She hadn't been called Aurora in years—not since Cardiff, not since she'd shed it like old skin. The name landed somewhere between her shoulder blades, and she turned slowly, the takeaway containers shifting, the scent of Yu-Fei's special Szechuan prawns rising warm and peppery between her and the woman standing on the pavement. The woman was tall. That hadn't changed. But everything else had. Niamh O'Donnell had been broad-shouldered and ruddy-cheeked, the kind of girl who rolled up to lectures in muddied boots and laughed so loud the tutors flinched. This person wore a charcoal wool coat that hit just below the knee, her auburn hair—once perpetually tangled—now cut into a precise bob that moved as one piece. A leather bag hung from her shoulder that cost more than Rory made in a month. Maybe two. "Niamh," Rory said, and the name tasted strange, like a word in a language she hadn't spoken in too long. Niamh's smile was careful. Practiced. "You look exactly the same." "You don't." They stood there a moment too long, the neon sign tinting them both faintly green, and then Niamh laughed—a shorter, tidier version of the laugh Rory remembered—and gestured toward the bar's entrance. "Buy you a drink? Or does the food need to get somewhere?" Rory glanced down at the containers. Her dinner. Her quiet night. Her rerun of something forgettable on the old laptop with the cracked hinge. "It can wait," she said. Inside, The Raven's Nest was doing its usual Thursday trade—not packed, not empty, that comfortable hum of low conversation and clinking glass that Silas seemed to cultivate like a gardener tending a specific species of plant. The old maps on the walls caught fragments of candlelight. The black-and-white photographs—cities Rory had never visited, faces she'd never asked about—watched from their frames with their usual inscrutable patience. Silas was behind the bar, drying a pint glass with a white cloth, his silver signet ring catching light as he turned the glass in his hands. His hazel eyes tracked Rory and Niamh as they slid onto the stools, and he set the glass down without a word, just that slight lift of his eyebrow that served, in the Silas Blackwood lexicon, as both greeting and question. "Two whiskeys," Rory said. Then, glancing at Niamh: "Still Jameson?" "God, no. Whatever single malt you have." Niamh set her leather bag on the bar with the sort of ease that suggested she was accustomed to putting expensive things on sticky surfaces and not caring. Or at least performing not caring. Silas poured two measures of Talisker without comment, his slight limp barely noticeable as he moved along the bar. He set the glasses down, and his gaze lingered on Rory for a half second longer than casual—a silent check-in, the kind he'd been doing since she moved into the flat upstairs. She gave him a microscopic nod, and he drifted to the other end of the bar to attend to a man reading a folded newspaper. Niamh took a slow sip and looked around. "This place has character." "That's one word for it." "I like it. It's very you." Rory wrapped her fingers around her glass. The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist pressed against the cool surface. "You don't know what's very me anymore, Niamh." The words came out sharper than she'd intended. Or maybe exactly as sharp as she'd intended—she couldn't tell. Niamh absorbed them with a slight tightening around the eyes, then set her glass down and turned it slowly with her fingertips. "No," she said. "I suppose I don't." Silence settled between them, and the bar filled it with its own noise—someone laughed near the back, ice cracked in a shaker, an old Chet Baker record murmured from speakers Rory had never been able to locate. "Three years," Rory said. "Three and a half." "Three and a half, then. Since the trial." Niamh's jaw tightened at the word. The trial. Brendan Carter defending a local councillor on fraud charges, and Niamh—then a junior reporter for the South Wales Echo—had run the story that turned public opinion toxic before the jury even sat down. Rory's father had lost. Not because of the article, maybe. But not entirely separate from it either. These things never were. "I did my job, Aurora." "Rory." "Rory." Niamh corrected herself like someone stepping around a crack in the pavement. "I did my job." "I know you did." Rory took a sip. The Talisker burned in a way that felt honest. "That's not why I stopped calling." Niamh looked at her. Really looked at her, for the first time since the pavement outside—not the quick social scan but the kind of searching gaze that used to pass between them in the library at Cardiff, cramming for exams at two in the morning, when they were too tired for pretense and too young to know that pretense was a skill they'd eventually need. "Then why?" Rory turned the glass again. The amber liquid caught the candlelight and held it. She thought about the flat upstairs—the thin walls, the radiator that clanked like a ghost with a grudge, the way she'd arranged her life into something small enough to carry. She thought about Evan. About the night she'd left Cardiff with a duffel bag and a train ticket Eva had paid for, how she'd sat in the quiet car and watched Wales dissolve into darkness through the window and hadn't cried because crying would have meant she was still connected to everything she was leaving. "Because you reminded me of who I was supposed to be," Rory said. "And I couldn't stand it." The words sat between them like something placed on the bar—solid, visible, impossible to pretend wasn't there. Niamh's throat moved. She lifted her glass and drank, and when she set it down, her composure had slipped just slightly, the polished veneer cracking to show something older underneath. Something Rory recognized. "Pre-Law Rory," Niamh said softly. "Brendan's daughter. The one who was going to change the system from the inside." "That's the one." "And instead you're—" Niamh stopped herself. "Delivering Chinese food and living above a bar in Soho." Rory said it evenly, without apology. She'd practiced that evenness. It had taken a long time. "Go ahead. I've heard the versions. Mam's. Dad's. Eva tries to be gentle about it, but even she—" "I wasn't going to say anything like that." "Weren't you?" Niamh turned on her stool to face Rory fully. The charcoal coat shifted, revealing a silk blouse underneath, a thin gold chain at the throat. She looked, Rory thought, like someone who had been assembled by a stylist—or who had become her own stylist, which was perhaps worse. "I was going to say that you look lighter," Niamh said. "Than the last time I saw you. You looked—I don't know. Hunted." The word landed in Rory's chest and sat there, heavy and warm. Hunted. She thought of Evan's hand on her wrist—always the left one, always right over the scar, as if he'd known exactly where to press. She thought of how fear had lived in her body like a low-frequency sound, always there, turning everything to static. "I was," Rory said simply. Something passed across Niamh's face—recognition, maybe. Or guilt. The specific guilt of someone who had been adjacent to a thing and hadn't seen it, or had seen it and hadn't known how to name it. "The boyfriend," Niamh said quietly. "Evan." "You knew?" "I suspected. After. I went over things in my head, after you disappeared. The way you'd cancel plans. The way you stopped wearing short sleeves." Niamh's voice had lost its professional polish. Underneath was the old roughness, the girl from Limerick who'd come to Cardiff on a scholarship and treated every story like a moral obligation. "I should have said something." "What would you have said?" "I don't know. Something. Anything." Rory shook her head. "It wouldn't have mattered. I wasn't ready to hear it." She ran her thumb along the rim of the glass. "That's the thing no one tells you about getting out. You have to be the one to decide. No one else's voice gets in until you open the door." Silas passed behind the bar again, collecting empties. His hand brushed the counter near Rory's elbow—a proximity that wasn't accidental, she knew. He'd been watching from the far end, tracking the conversation the way he tracked everything, with that quiet, calibrated attention that came from decades of reading rooms for threat. She felt the steadiness of his presence like a hand on the small of her back that wasn't quite touching. Niamh glanced at him, then back at Rory, and something shifted in her expression—a recalibration. "You've built something here," Niamh said. Not a question. "Something small." "Small isn't nothing." Rory almost smiled. "When did you get wise?" "Somewhere between the Echo and The Guardian. They give you wisdom when you sign the contract. It's in the fine print." "The Guardian." Rory raised her eyebrows. "Look at you." "Investigative unit. White-collar crime, mostly. Financial fraud, shell companies, that sort of thing." Niamh paused. "I'm actually in London for a story. I didn't expect—" She gestured between them. "This." "The universe has a sick sense of humor." "Always has." They drank in silence for a while. Chet Baker gave way to something with a piano—slow, wandering, the kind of music that belonged in a room like this. "I looked you up," Niamh said eventually. "About a year ago. Couldn't find you anywhere. No socials. No professional listings. It was like you'd dissolved." "That was the idea." "Your dad told me you were in London. He gave me this look—you know the one, the barrister face, like he was weighing whether to disclose privileged information." Niamh's mouth twitched. "He said you were safe. That's all he'd say." Rory felt a pang she hadn't expected—a clean, bright ache for her father and his careful, lawyerly love. The way he'd never pushed. The way he'd sent a card every month with nothing in it but a twenty-pound note and a clipping from the Cardiff paper, no letter, no questions, just evidence that he was there and thinking of her. "He worries," Rory said. "He should. Parents should." Niamh looked down at her glass. "Mine don't anymore. Mam passed two years ago. Dad's in a home in Adare. Doesn't know Tuesday from Sunday." "Niamh. I'm sorry." "Don't be. It's just time doing what time does." She drained the last of her whiskey and set the glass down with a soft click. "That's what tonight is about, isn't it? Time and what it does. You've gone quiet and I've gone glossy and neither of us is who we planned to be in that library at two in the morning." Rory looked at her—this stranger who wasn't quite a stranger, this woman built on the ruins of a girl she'd loved fiercely once, before everything contracted. She thought about the delivery bag she'd left by the side door, Yu-Fei's prawns going cold, the evening she'd planned and the evening she'd gotten instead. "Do you regret any of it?" Rory asked. "The article. The way things went." Niamh was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the piano piece ended and another began. Long enough that Silas finished his circuit and settled at the far end of the bar, polishing his signet ring absently with his thumb, his gaze elsewhere but his attention—Rory knew—precisely here. "Every day," Niamh said. "But not because I was wrong. Because being right cost me you." The honesty of it was like a window thrown open in a stale room. Rory felt the air move through her. "It wasn't just the article," Rory said. "I want you to know that. It was everything. I was drowning and you were the last piece of the life I was drowning in. Cutting you off wasn't fair. It wasn't even logical. It was survival." "I know." Niamh's voice was barely above the music. "I know that now." Rory reached across the bar and touched Niamh's hand—briefly, lightly, the way you'd touch something you weren't sure was real. Niamh's fingers were cold. She'd always run cold. Some things didn't change. "I can't go backward," Rory said. "I'm not asking you to." "But I'm here. And you're here. And this bar makes an excellent neutral territory." Niamh looked around again at the old maps, the photographs, the green-tinted light falling through the front window. She looked at Rory with the ghost of the old grin—the wide, reckless one—flickering at the edges of the new, composed smile. "Thursday nights?" Niamh said. "I work most Thursdays. Tuesdays are better." "Tuesdays, then." Rory signaled Silas for two more. He poured them without being told what, because Silas always knew, and brought them over with that slight, almost imperceptible nod that meant he approved—or at least didn't object, which from Silas Blackwood amounted to the same thing. They clinked glasses. The whiskey was warm. The bar hummed around them. And somewhere in the space between who they'd been and who they were, a small, cautious thing took root—not forgiveness, not yet, but the possibility of it, which was, Rory thought, the braver thing anyway.