Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNFCN2WYVVSE4YVCSM42AMB

The neon green glow from the sign cast strange shadows across the bar, painting everything in that particular shade of luminescence that made the world feel like a photograph someone had taken years ago and never quite threw away. Aurora Carter—Rory, to the handful of people who still called her that—wiped down the counter for the third time that evening, though it hardly needed it. The Raven's Nest didn't get busy until later, when the theatre crowds spilled out into the Soho streets and the lonely came looking for company that asked no questions. She'd just finished her shift, technically. But Silas was in the back doing accounts, and the flat upstairs felt too quiet tonight, too full of the particular silence that came from being alone with thoughts she didn't want to examine too closely. The door opened. She didn't look up immediately—muscle memory from years of deliveries, of dropping off orders at flats where people never quite met your eyes. But something in the quality of the silence that followed made her raise her head. The woman standing just inside the entrance wore a cashmere coat the color of champagne, her blonde hair pulled back in a style that cost more than Rory's weekly wages. She was scanning the room with the careful assessment of someone looking for someone specific, and when her gaze found the bar—and Rory—something shifted across her face. It took a full three seconds for Rory to place her. Three seconds of studying the architecture of cheekbones that seemed sharper than she remembered, the careful makeup that softened whatever lay beneath, the way she held herself like someone had taught her to take up space. Then the memory surfaced, inconvenient and sharp: Cardiff, a cramped flat with damp walls, the two of them sprawled across a secondhand sofa watching films on a laptop that constantly buffered. Teaching each other the words to songs they'd both pretend they'd forgotten by morning. "Emma," Rory said. The name came out strange in her own ears, like a word in a language she'd stopped speaking. EmmaWhitmore—Emma Davies, back then, before she'd married up and shed the old name like dead skin—crossed the room in four measured steps and stopped at the bar. Up close, she smelled of something expensive and unobtrusive, the kind of perfume that announced wealth without ever saying its name. "Rory." Emma's voice was careful, the way people spoke to animals they weren't sure wouldn't bite. "I wasn't sure you'd be here. I asked around—someone said you worked here, but I didn't—" She stopped. "You look different." "You came to find me." It wasn't a question. Rory leaned against the counter, feeling the familiar grain of the wood through her palms, grounding herself in the small reality of it. Emma Whitmore, née Davies, standing in The Raven's Nest in Soho, looking like she'd stepped out of a magazine while Rory stood there in her work polo with grease stains on her fingers from the delivery bike chain she'd had to fix that afternoon. "I heard you were in London." Emma's eyes kept moving, cataloging: the maps on the walls, the old photographs, the way the light fell. "I was in the area. I thought—" She laughed, a small, brittle sound. "I don't know what I thought. That maybe you'd be glad to see me?" The question hung between them. Rory remembered the last time she'd seen Emma—three days before she'd fled Cardiff, before Evan, before all of it. They'd sat in that same cramped flat, and Emma had said, You could stay. You could stay and wait it out. And Rory had looked at her and understood that Emma couldn't comprehend why anyone would choose to leave everything they'd ever known, and Emma had looked at Rory and couldn't understand why she wouldn't just go back, just apologize, just make it work. They'd been seventeen. They hadn't spoken since. "I'm glad," Rory said, because it was easier than saying anything else. "Do you want a drink?" Emma slid onto a stool, her coat rustling. "Wine. White. Whatever you have." Rory poured a glass of house white—nothing expensive, nothing that would pair with whatever Emma was used to—and set it in front of her. Their fingers brushed briefly, and Emma pulled back like she'd been burned. "How did you find me?" Rory asked. "People talk. You know how it is." Emma took a sip, made a face that she quickly smoothed over. "You're not hard to find, if you know where to look. Living above a bar in Soho. Working deliveries." She said it without judgment, or at least without letting the judgment reach her eyes. "It's not what I expected." "What did you expect?" Emma turned the glass in her hands, watching the light catch the liquid. "I don't know. I suppose I thought—" She stopped. Started again. "When you left, everyone said things. That you'd gone to London to be with someone. That you'd got yourself into trouble. That you'd just cracked, finally, and run away like everyone always knew you would." The words landed like small, precise incisions. Rory felt them open something she'd spent years stitching shut. "And what did you think?" "I thought you were brave." Emma met her eyes then, and for a moment she looked like herself again—the girl who'd snuck out at sixteen to meet Rory behind the school gym, who'd held her hand through the worst night of her life and never once let go. "I thought you were the bravest person I'd ever known, and I hated you for it a little bit, because it made the rest of us look like cowards." Rory said nothing. The silence stretched between them, filled with the murmur of other conversations, the clink of glasses, the particular hum of a bar at eight o'clock on a Tuesday when the night hadn't quite decided what it wanted to be. "I'm sorry," Emma said finally. "For not calling. For not—" She gestured vaguely. "For all of it." "You were seventeen." "So were you." The door opened again, letting in a gust of October air and two men in suits who headed for the back corner. Rory watched them go, her mind moving in that particular way it did when she needed to think about something other than the thing directly in front of her. "I should go," Emma said. She hadn't touched her wine again. "I just—I wanted to see if you were okay. If you'd—" She paused. "If you'd become someone you'd want to be." "Did I?" Emma looked at her for a long moment. Something complicated moved behind her eyes—loss, maybe, or recognition, or the particular grief that came from seeing someone you'd known as a child and realizing they'd become someone entirely new. "You became someone," Emma said. "I'm not sure yet if she's someone you want to be. But she's real. That's more than most people manage." She left money on the counter—too much, far too much—and stood. At the door, she paused, half-turning back. "Evan died," she said. "Last year. I thought you should know." Then she was gone, swallowed by the neon glow and the London night, and Rory was alone with a glass of wine she hadn't charged for and the weight of years pressing down on her shoulders like something physical. Silas emerged from the back room eventually, his limp barely perceptible on the worn floorboards. He took one look at her face and said nothing, just poured two fingers of whiskey and slid it across the bar. "Old friend?" he asked. Rory shook her head. "Old life," she said. "Different thing." She thought about Cardiff, about Evan, about the flat with damp walls and the girl who'd held her hand through the worst night. She thought about the scar on her wrist, the small crescent from a childhood accident that had seemed like the worst thing in the world until she'd learned what other things could happen to a body. She thought about the person she'd been at seventeen, at twenty, at twenty-five, and the person she was still becoming. The whiskey burned going down. Outside, the green neon sign flickered, casting its strange light across the empty street. She'd become someone real. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was all anyone could ever really ask.