AI The green neon crow cast its sickly light over the damp pavement, a beacon for the lost and the looking. Rory shouldered the heavy door of The Raven’s Nest open, the familiar scent of old wood, spilled ale, and Silas’s particular brand of lemon polish washing over her. It was a smell that had come to mean safety.
It was her slow night, the deliveries for Yu-Fei having tapered off hours ago, and the silence of her flat above the bar had begun to feel less like peace and more like a vacuum. Down here, there was at least the low hum of life. A few regulars hunched over their glasses, the soft clack of a game of darts from the back, the low thrum of some forgotten blues record spinning on Silas’s antique player.
She slid onto her usual stool at the far end of the polished mahogany, the one with a clear view of both exits and the street through the smudged front window. Silas was at the other end, polishing a glass with a slow, deliberate motion that spoke of a lifetime of measured movements. He gave her a slow, almost imperceptible nod, his hazel eyes missing nothing. The silver signet ring on his right hand caught the low light as he set the glass down and began to make his way toward her, the faint, familiar hitch in his step a quiet percussion to the music.
Before he could reach her, the door swung open again, letting in a burst of chilly night air and the distant wail of a siren. A man stood silhouetted against the light of the street, and something about the hesitant way he took a step inside, the slight squint as his eyes adjusted to the gloom , made Rory’s skin prickle. It was a posture from another life.
Then he stepped fully into the light of a wall sconce, and the past sucker-punched her in the gut.
Evan.
But not the Evan she remembered. The boy she’d known had been all sharp angles and restless energy, a live wire with a quick, disarming smile that never quite reached his eyes. This man was softer, blurred at the edges. His hair, once a chaotic mess of dark curls, was shorter, tamer, threaded with the first hints of silver at the temples. There were new lines around his eyes, the kind carved by worry or disappointment, not laughter. He wore a sensible woollen coat, buttoned neatly, and his hands were shoved into the pockets as he scanned the room. He looked like a faded photograph of someone she’d once loved.
His gaze swept over the dart players, the old men at the bar, and then landed on her. It took a second. A flicker of confusion , then a dawning, stunned recognition that mirrored her own. His mouth fell open slightly .
“Laila?” he breathed, the old pet name a ghost in the quiet bar.
Rory felt the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist twitch, a phantom pain from a long-ago fall from a tree he’d dared her to climb. She hadn’t been Laila in a long, long time.
Silas had stopped his approach, his posture shifting from bartender to sentinel . He stood perfectly still behind the bar, a watchful statue, his eyes fixed on Evan. Rory gave a tiny, almost invisible shake of her head. *Stand down.*
“Evan,” she said. Her voice was calm, cooler than she felt. It was the voice she used for difficult customers, for dodgy traffic, for packing a bag in the dead of night. “Fancy meeting you in a place like this. I thought you hated ‘dingy old pubs’.”
He flinched almost imperceptibly at the echo of his own past judgment, then managed a weak smile. “People change.” He took a few tentative steps closer, stopping a prudent distance from her stool. “God, it’s really you. I heard you’d moved to London, but…” He trailed off, his eyes doing a quick inventory of her: the black hair, the worn leather jacket, the fact that she was sitting in this shadowy Soho bar like she owned the stool. “You look… well.”
“I am well,” she said, and it was mostly true. She turned back to the bar, signalling to Silas that it was okay. After a beat, he resumed his journey, his limp more pronounced. He stopped in front of her.
“The usual, Rory?” Silas asked, his voice a low rumble . He pointedly did not look at Evan.
“Please, Si.”
Evan’s eyebrows shot up at the familiar nickname, at the easy dynamic between her and this imposing , grey-streaked man. Silas poured two fingers of a good Scotch into a heavy-bottomed glass and slid it to her without a word before retreating to his end of the bar, giving them the illusion of privacy while maintaining his vigil.
“Rory?” Evan repeated softly . He pulled out the stool next to her, the wood groaning in protest. “That’s new.”
“It’s not,” she said, taking a sip. The whisky burned a clean, honest path down her throat. “It just wasn’t for you.” The words hung between them, blunt and heavy.
He absorbed the blow, nodding slowly as he looked down at his own hands resting on the bar. “Fair enough.” He signaled to Silas for a pint. The silence stretched, filled with five years of absences, of words hurled and doors slammed, of frantic, whispered phone calls to Eva and a one-way train ticket clutched in a sweaty palm.
“You look different,” he said finally, unable to bear the quiet .
“So do you.” She turned to face him properly now. “The silver suits you. Makes you look distinguished.”
He gave a short, humourless laugh. “Stress, more likely. Accountancy will do that to a man.” He said it like a confession, like he was admitting to a shameful disease.
Rory almost smiled. Evan, an accountant. The boy who’d reviled his father’s steady, colourless jobing across Asia, of writing a novel, of living on his own terms. The ambition had been one of the things she’d loved, before it curdled into a different kind of entitlement.
“It’s a steady job,” she said, noncommittally .
“It is.” He accepted his pint from a stone-faced Silas. “Pays the mortgage. Lets me take the wife to Portugal for a week in the summer.”
The word *wife * landed between them with a dull, leaden thud. She hadn’t known. Eva, her loyal intelligence operative, had apparently deemed that piece of information irrelevant to Rory’s new life. She felt a surge of gratitude for her friend.
“Congratulations,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it. She hoped, for the unnamed wife ’s sake, that the steady job and the holidays in Portugal had sanded down his rougher edges. She hoped the hands that now clutched a pint glass had learned gentleness.
“Yeah, thanks. Her name’s Chloe. She’s a primary school teacher.” He was watching her closely, looking for a reaction—a flinch, a sign of jealousy, anything.
Rory just took another sip of whisky. “Sounds nice.”
The conversation was like walking through a minefield in the dark. Every innocuous topic—the weather, London’s traffic, the cost of a pint—was booby-trapped with the explosives of their shared history. They talked in circles, two diplomats from opposing nations, carefully avoiding the disputed territories.
He asked about her parents. She gave bland updates. She asked about his family. He offered polished, practised answers. The people they were now were making polite, awkward conversation. But the ghosts of the people they had been were screaming in the space between them.
He finally gestured around the bar with his glass. “So, this is your local? Not really your scene, is it? I remember you liked those bright places with the big windows. All light and plants.”
“I remember you liked dark rooms and drawn curtains,” she countered quietly.
He had the decency to look ashamed. “I was an idiot.”
“Yes,” she agreed softly . “You were.”
The admission, and her acceptance of it, seemed to crack something open in him. The careful, accountant demeanour faltered. He looked tired. “I looked for you, you know. After. I went to your dad’s. He wouldn’t even come to the door. Just told me through the letterbox to piss off and never come back.” He attempted a smile. “He had a hell of a vocabulary for a barrister.”
“He meant it,” Rory said, her father’s protective fury a warm memory .
“I know.” Evan swirled the dregs of his beer. “I’m… God, Laila—Rory—I don’t even know how to say it. I’m so sorry. For all of it. The shouting. The… the grabbing. The horrible things I said. I wasn’t in control of myself. I was a different person.”
The apology was here. The one she’d sometimes wondered if she’d ever get. It was five years too late, and it landed not with a sense of closure, but with a profound and weary sadness. It was an apology from a stranger about a boy who no longer existed, addressed to a girl who was also gone.
“I know you were,” she said. “And I’m a different person too.” She finished her whisky, the glass making a final, decisive click on the wood. “That’s why I left. To make sure of it.”
He nodded, his eyes glistening in the dim light. He looked like he might say more, might try to bridge the uncrossable distance between the ‘then’ and ‘now’, but the words wouldn’t come. There was too much wreckage. Some things couldn’t be rebuilt; they could only be marked on a map and avoided.
He pulled out his wallet, left a tenner on the bar for his pint, and stood up. The movement was hesitant, awkward. “It was… it was really good to see you, Rory. Really. I’m glad you’re… you’re well.”
“You too, Evan. Give my best to Chloe.”
He gave a jerky nod, pulled his sensible coat tighter around him, and walked out of the Raven’s Nest, leaving the ghost of their past sitting at the bar. The green neon light flashed once across the closing door.
Silas materialized again, picking up the empty whisky glass and the ten-pound note. He didn’t ask. He simply wiped down the space where Evan had been sitting, erasing the physical evidence of his presence.
“Another?” he asked, his voice low .
Rory looked at her reflection in the dark mirror behind the bottles. She saw the woman she’d built herself into, piece by careful piece. She saw the straight black hair, the steady blue eyes, the scar on her wrist. She saw resilience.
“No,” she said, sliding off the stool. “I’m good.”
She climbed the stairs to her flat, the sounds of the bar fading below her. The silence upstairs was no longer a vacuum. It was just silence . Hers. And for the first time in a long time, it felt entirely, completely peaceful.