AI The green neon sign buzzed like a trapped insect against the gathering dusk. Inside The Raven’s Nest, the air was thick with the smell of old wood, polished brass, and the earthy peat of a decent Scotch. Aurora Carter—Rory to almost no one here—sat at the far end of the bar, her back to the wall. It was a habit, that positioning, one she’d picked up without even realizing it. She traced the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist with her thumb, a slow, absent circle, as she watched Silas pour a measure of Macallan for a man in a rumpled suit.
Silas moved with a deliberate economy, the slight hitch in his left leg barely noticeable unless you knew to look for it. The silver signet ring on his right hand caught the low light as he placed the glass down. He caught her eye and gave a barely perceptible nod towards the hidden door behind the bookshelf, a question. She shook her head once. No meetings tonight. Just the quiet hum of the bar and the weight of her own thoughts, which were, as usual, a tangled knot of delivery routes for Yu-Fei and the ghost of a law degree she’d abandoned.
The door opened, slicing in a wedge of sodium-lit street noise and the distant wail of a siren. A man stepped in, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom . He was tall, with the kind of broad-shouldered frame that strained the seams of a good wool coat. He scanned the room, his gaze passing over the maps on the walls, the lone drinkers at their tables, and then landing on her.
Rory felt the recognition like a small, cold shock. It wasn’t immediate. Time had worked on him, adding thickness where there had been lean muscle, etching lines of weariness around his eyes that a smile couldn’t erase. His hair was shorter, military-neat, and touched with grey at the temples. But the set of his jaw, the way he held his head slightly tilted as he looked at her—it was David. David Griffiths.
He’d been a rugby player at Cardiff, all roaring laughter and easy confidence. They’d been friends, of a sort. Running in overlapping social circles, sharing the occasional late-night kebab after the library, debating politics with a fervor that only the very young and very privileged could muster. That was before Evan. Before the slow, insistent closing of doors. She hadn’t seen David since her final year, since she’d begun to vanish from her own life.
He walked towards her, his steps hesitant. She didn’t get up. She just watched him, her face carefully neutral, the cool-headed mask she’d cultivated slipping into place.
“Rory?” His voice was deeper, rougher around the edges. A smoker’s voice, now. “Bloody hell. Aurora Carter?”
“David.” She nodded to the stool beside her. “Fancy seeing your face here.”
He slid onto the stool, his coat rustling. He smelled of cold air, cigarette smoke, and a faint, expensive cologne. “I’m in town for a conference. Bored out of my skull at the hotel. Thought I’d find a proper pub.” He looked around, taking in the shadowy corners, the photographs of forgotten places. “This is a bit off the beaten track.”
“It’s quiet,” she said.
Silas appeared, a clean towel in his hands. His hazel eyes took in David with the swift, appraising glance of a former spymaster. “For you, sir?”
“Double Talisker, neat,” David said, then glanced at Rory’s nearly empty glass of ginger beer. “And whatever she’s having. A proper drink, I mean. You still drink, Rory?”
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice even.
Silas raised an eyebrow at her. She gave a slight shake of her head. He poured the Scotch and moved away to the other end of the bar, giving them the illusion of privacy.
David took a long sip, exhaling slowly as the peat hit his system. “God, I needed that. So. London. I heard you’d moved. Never thought I’d actually stumble across you.” His eyes searched her face. “You look … different.”
“It’s been seven years,” she said. “People change.”
“You changed your hair. You used to have those long curls. Always a bit wild.”
She self-consciously tucked a strand of straight, shoulder-length black hair behind her ear. “Easier to manage.”
“And you’re… what? A barrister now? Following in your dad’s footsteps ? Brendan Carter’s daughter, that’s what everyone always said you’d be.”
The weight of the un-lived life pressed down on her. She could see her father’s disappointed face, hear her mother’s worried sighs from three hundred miles away. “Not quite,” she said. “I deliver food. For a Chinese restaurant.”
He blinked, then let out a short, disbelieving laugh. It wasn’t cruel, just utterly baffled. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
He studied her. The bright blue of her eyes, which he’d once called ‘daftly optimistic,’ now held a flat, assessing coolness. The neat, practical clothes. The way her hands rested on the bar, capable and still. No fidgeting. “No,” he conceded quietly. “No, you don’t. Delivery. Right. So, the law thing…”
“Didn’t take.”
“But you were brilliant. You argued old Professor Davies into a corner over habeas corpus. He nearly had an aneurysm.”
“Arguing in a pub is different from arguing in court,” she said, a trace of old bitterness seeping through . “Turns out I didn’t have the stomach for the family business.”
He swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “I went into finance. Canary Wharf. Married a girl from Surrey. Two kids. A semi in Esher.” He recited it like a list of achievements, but his voice was hollow. “It’s… it’s fine. It’s what you do.”
“Sounds like a life,” Rory said.
“It is a life. A bloody expensive one.” He took another drink. “What about you? Married? Kids?”
“No.”
“Seeing anyone?”
Her left thumb found the scar on her wrist again, pressing down. “No.”
A silence stretched between them, filled by the low murmur of a jazz record Silas had put on. It was a tune full of melancholy notes and spaces.
“I heard about Evan,” David said suddenly, his voice dropping . “After you left. People talked. I wish… I wish I’d known how bad it was.”
The sound of the name was like a door slamming shut in a distant room of her mind. She kept her breathing even. “It was a long time ago.”
“Was it?” He looked at her, really looked, and she saw a flicker of the old David—the one who’d been perceptive, who’d cared. “You disappeared, Rory. One day you were there, the next you’d ghosted everyone. Eva said you’d gone to London, but you changed your number, deleted your socials. It was like you’d been erased. We were friends. I worried.”
“You didn’t worry enough to find me,” she said, and immediately regretted it. It sounded like an accusation, and she didn’t want to give him that power.
He flinched. “You’re right. I didn’t. I was wrapped up in my own stuff. The job, the climb. I thought you were just… having a rough patch. I didn’t know it was a war.” He finished his drink and signaled Silas for another. Silas glanced at Rory. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. Let him have it.
“This place,” David said, following her gaze to Silas, who poured the drink with silent efficiency. “You’re a regular.”
“I live upstairs.”
“Above a Soho bar?” The disbelief was back, tinged with something like concern . “Is that… safe?”
“It’s quieter than you’d think.” She almost smiled. If only he knew about the hidden room, the encrypted messages Silas sometimes asked her to decipher using her logical, out-of-the-box mind, the quiet network of informants that used the bar as a hub. Her life was a palimpsest, and the surface layer of ‘food delivery girl’ was the least interesting part.
“You’ve become hard, Rory,” he said softly .
“I’ve become realistic.”
“It’s not the same thing.” He sighed, a heavy, weary sound. “Do you remember that night after we won the varsity match? We all went to that terrible club on the docks. You danced on a table. You were laughing so hard you cried. I have a photo of that somewhere.”
She remembered. The sticky floor, the pounding music, the feeling of invincibility that came from youth and cheap vodka. The memory was like watching a film of a stranger. “That girl got tired,” Rory said. “She got tired of laughing at things that weren’t funny.”
David stared into his fresh drink. The weight of time settled between them, a physical thing. He was mourning the vibrant, sharp-tongued girl he’d known. She was guarding the scarred, cautious woman she’d had to become. They were both prisoners of the person she’d been, but only one of them had to live with the escape.
“I think about those days a lot,” he said. “They seemed so consequential. Every essay, every argument, every party felt like the most important thing in the world. Now I sell bonds to pension funds. My biggest worry is whether my mortgage rate will go up.” He looked at her, and his expression was naked with a regret she knew wasn’t just for her. “You were supposed to do something… luminous. Something that mattered.”
The word ‘luminous’ hung in the smoky air. It belonged to a different lexicon, one of poetry and naive ambition. She felt a sudden, surprising pang —not for the loss of that potential, but for the fact that he still believed in it, that somewhere in his spreadsheet existence, he clung to the idea that a life could shine.
“I deliver food,” she repeated, her voice gentle for the first time . “It matters to the people who are hungry. And I think, most days, that’s enough.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He just nodded, defeated by a simplicity he couldn’t comprehend.
He paid his tab with a crisp fifty-pound note, telling Silas to keep the change. He stood, pulling on his coat. “It was good to see you, Rory. Truly.”
“You too, David.”
He hesitated, as if he might hug her, or offer a pat on the shoulder. She didn’t move from her stool, her posture clear. He offered a sad, half-smile instead. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too. Give my best to Esher.”
He gave a final, lingering look , trying perhaps to reconcile the woman before him with the ghost in his memory. Then he turned and walked out into the London night, the door swinging shut behind him, sealing the bar back into its bubble of quiet amber light.
Silas came over and collected the empty glass. “Old friend?” he asked, his tone neutral .
“Old life,” Rory corrected.
Silas grunted, polishing the glass with his towel. “They’re the heaviest to carry.” He didn’t ask for details. He never did.
Rory looked down at her hands, at the small, pale crescent on her wrist. A childhood accident, she always said. A simple story for a simple scar. She finished her ginger beer, the sweet bite of it grounding her in the present, in the dim, map-lined bar that was, for now, the closest thing she had to a home. The past had walked in, sat down, and shown her its own weary face. Then it had left again. And she was still here. Changed, yes. Harder, perhaps. But here. She caught Silas’s eye and nodded towards the hidden door behind the bookshelf. Maybe there was work to do after all.