AI The green neon sign buzzed like a trapped insect in the damp London evening, casting an otherworldly glow on the wet pavement. *The Raven’s Nest *. Aurora pushed the heavy door open, the weight of it familiar in her hand. The smell of old wood, spilled whiskey, and lemon polish washed over her, a welcome blanket after the chill outside and the greasy-sweet smell of takeaway boxes that had clung to her all day.
It was early, and the bar was quiet. A couple of regulars hunched like bookends at the far end, and the low murmur of a football match whispered from a corner television. Her shoulders ached from the scooter, from hauling bags up stairwells. All she wanted was a quiet pint and the dim sanctuary of her flat upstairs.
Silas was behind the bar, polishing a glass with a slow, methodical twist of the cloth. He looked up, his hazel eyes catching the low light. “Rory. Long day?”
“Aren’t they all?” she said, sliding onto a stool. She nodded toward the tap. He set the glass down and began pulling her a lager, his movements precise, economical. The silver signet ring on his right hand flashed. She watched the way he favored his left leg, the slight shift of weight as he turned to place the full pint before her. It was a familiar dance .
She was halfway through the pint, the cool bitterness washing the taste of the city away, when the door opened again. A draft, a shift in the light. She didn’t look up until she heard the voice.
“Good God. Aurora Carter?”
The voice was deeper than she remembered, polished with a confidence that had once been aspirational, not assured. She turned.
Leo stood there, a camel coat draped over his shoulders, his hair expensively cut, his face a more defined, more tired version of the boy she’d known. Leo Fenton. They’d been in the same pre-law cohort at Cardiff, part of a tight, ambitious little group that debated jurisprudence in the student union until it closed, dreaming of chambers and high courts.
“Leo,” she said. The name felt strange in her mouth.
He moved toward her, a wide, disbelieving smile on his face. He didn’t sit, just stood before her stool, looking her up and down. She was acutely aware of her practical jacket, the faint smell of fried rice that probably still lingered on her, the simple black ponytail she’d shoved her hair into that morning.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, his laugh a rich, practiced sound. “What on earth are you doing in London? Last I heard, you were… well, no one quite knew. You vanished after…”
“After my father died,” she finished for him, her voice flat. She took a sip of her pint.
“Yes. A terrible shock. We all felt for you.” He finally took the stool next to her, signalling to Silas. “Glenfiddich, neat, please.” He turned back to her . “So? Solicitor? Barrister? Don’t tell me you’re at the Old Bailey already, slumming it in a pub.”
Silas placed the whiskey before Leo without a word, but his eyes lingered on Rory for a fraction of a second. A silent question. She gave a minute shake of her head.
“I’m not in law,” she said.
Leo’s smile didn’t falter, but it stiffened at the edges. “No? Teaching, then? Like your mum? You always had a brilliant way of explaining the obscure bits of tort law.”
“Not teaching.” She traced the handle of her pint glass with her thumb. The small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the light. A childhood fall from a tree. It felt like a scar from a different person entirely.
“Well, you’ve got me intrigued,” Leo said, leaning in. His cologne was subtle and expensive. “What does the great Aurora Carter do, if not bend the legal world to her will? We all thought you were a sure thing. Your father was so proud.”
The mention of her father, of that particular kind of pride, was a needle. She saw her father’s face, stern but loving, saw the stack of law texts he’d gifted her on her first day. All of it now felt like artefacts in a museum of a life that wasn’t hers.
“I deliver food,” she said, looking directly at him.
For a moment, he simply blinked. The words didn’t seem to compute. “You… deliver?”
“For a Chinese restaurant. On a scooter. Part-time.” She said it cleanly, precisely , like stating evidence. She watched the confusion in his eyes curdle into a kind of horrified pity.
“Aurora,” he said, his voice dropping . “Good lord. What happened?”
“Life happened, Leo.”
He took a swift drink of his whiskey. “But your mind… it’s a *waste *. I mean, no offence to… delivery persons. But you. You argued circles around Professor Hennessy. You were going to change the world.”
“Was I?” she asked, and it was a genuine question. She remembered the girl who believed that, the one who wore blazers and planned her future in five-year increments. That girl had been buried alongside her father, and then again in the wreckage of a relationship with a man named Evan, who preferred his women silent and compliant.
“Of course you were!” Leo’s face was animated now, flushed with drink and a sudden, passionate dismay. “We all were. Look at us. James is at a magic circle firm. Anya is a junior crown prosecutor. I’m in mergers and acquisitions.” He said it not to boast, but as proof of a plan correctly executed . “We *did * it. You were the best of us. And you’re… you’re *here *.” His gesture took in the dim bar, the old maps on the walls, Silas quietly wiping down the counter.
“I live here ,” she said. “The flat’s upstairs.”
This was the final, unanswerable blow. Leo stared at her, his jaw working slightly . He looked around now, truly seeing the place. The worn leather of the booths, the faint patina of dust on the framed photographs of places no one could identify. A retired spy’s museum. Not the habitat of a rising legal star.
“Why?” The word was a breath.
She thought of the suffocating pressure of law school after her father’s sudden heart attack, the way every case study felt like a betrayal of his ghost . She thought of Evan, his charming smile that later tightened into a sneer, his hands that weren’t always gentle. She thought of the frantic phone call to Eva, the escape to London with a single suitcase, the terrifying freedom of having no plan at all.
“The law felt like a cage,” she said simply, omitting everything in the middle. “This doesn’t.”
“This?” he echoed, incredulous .
“This.” She gestured to Silas, who was now inspecting a bottle of bourbon with deep concentration, giving them the illusion of privacy. “A quiet job. A quiet place. No one’s expectations to meet.”
Leo was silent for a long time. He finished his whiskey, the ice clinking softly . “We missed you, you know. At the reunions. People ask.”
“Do they?”
“They wonder what became of the brilliant Aurora Carter.”
She smiled then, a small, tight thing. “You can tell them she’s fine. She’s just Rory now. And she’s fine.”
He looked at her, really looked, past the practical clothes and the tired eyes. He was searching for the girl he’d known, the fierce intelligence, the ready laugh. It was still there, she knew, but it was tempered now, cooled in a different fire. It was the intelligence that navigated London’s backstreets on a foggy night, that managed Silas’s occasional cryptic errands, that kept her safe and self-contained. It wasn’t the kind of brilliance that shone in a courtroom. It was the kind that ensured survival.
“I don’t think you’re fine,” he said softly, the pity winning out .
“That’s because you’re comparing me to a ghost, Leo. I’m not her anymore.”
He nodded slowly , as if accepting a unfavourable verdict . He pulled a card from his wallet, thick, creamy stock with embossed lettering. He placed it on the bar beside her pint. “If you ever change your mind. The offer’s always open. I could make introductions. It’s not too late.”
She looked at the card but didn’t touch it. “Thank you.”
He stood, draping his coat back over his shoulders. He seemed taller, more solid in this dim light, a man carved from success. She remained on the stool, a figure in the shadows. The distance between them was no longer just the width of a bar; it was a chasm of years and choices, lined with the unspoken rubble of regret—his for what he perceived she’d lost, and hers, perhaps, for the simplicity of the life he assumed she should want.
“It was good to see you, Aurora,” he said.
“You too, Leo.”
He left, the door sighing shut behind him, cutting off the sound of the city. The green neon light bled through the window, painting a faint emerald stripe across the floorboards.
Silas moved down the bar and picked up Leo’s empty glass. “Friend from the old life?”
“Something like that.”
“He looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
Rory finally picked up the business card. *Leo Fenton, Associate. Sterling, Vale & Crowthorne LLP.* It felt heavy. She spun it once between her fingers, then slid it across the polished wood back toward Silas.
“Bin,” she said.
Silas took it, his face impassive. He didn’t throw it away, though. He slipped it under the counter, into a small drawer where he kept lost property and other forgotten things. He refilled her pint without asking, the glass whispering as he set it down.
“The past has a way of knocking,” he said, his voice a low rumble . “Doesn’t mean you have to answer.”
Rory wrapped her hands around the cool glass and looked toward the door, now still. The ghost had come and gone. The room felt quieter, emptier, and somehow more solid because of it. She was here . In the Nest. This was the life she had, for better or worse. It was real. She took a long, slow drink, and let the weight of the encounter settle, a sediment at the bottom of her soul.