AI The neon sign outside glowed a sickly green, casting long, distorted shadows across the rain-slicked pavement of the Soho street. Inside The Raven’s Nest, the world was sepia-toned and hushed. The scent of old wood, spilled whisky, and lemon polish hung in the air , a permanent fixture like the maps pinned to the walls. Aurora Carter sat at her usual spot at the end of the bar, her back to a corner where she could watch the door and the rest of the room. She traced the crescent scar on her left wrist absently with her thumb, a childhood habit resurfaced.
In her hand was a glass of Talisker, neat, a recent and expensive concession to Silas’s influence. He was polishing a tumbler at the other end, his movements economical, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the low light with each slow circle of the cloth. His slight limp was more pronounced tonight, a damp ache in the knee, she guessed. The bar was quiet for a Thursday; a couple murmured in a booth, a lone man nursed a pint by the fireplace, his eyes fixed on nothing.
The bell above the door jangled, a sharp sound in the quiet. A gust of wet, chill air swept in, followed by a man shrugging out of a damp trench coat. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, his hair darkened by the rain. He hung his coat on a peg and turned, scanning the room with a practiced, weary gaze.
Rory’s breath hitched. The glass stopped halfway to her lips.
It was Evan.
But it wasn’t. Not the Evan she remembered. The man who stood there, brushing rainwater from sleeves that were tailored and expensive, had the same bone structure , the same set of the jaw, but everything else was… reprocessed. The boyish softness was gone , carved away into angles and a tight, controlled expression. His eyes, which she remembered as being a warm, forgetful brown, now scanned the room like cold lenses, assessing threat and value. He’d filled out, the lanky frame of their university days replaced by solid muscle that strained subtly against his shirt. He looked like a photograph left in the sun too long, the colors all wrong, the image warped.
His gaze passed over her, then snapped back. For a second, the cold lens cracked. Surprise, then a swift, calculating blankness. He offered a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and started towards the bar.
Silas, ever observant, had paused his polishing. He caught Rory’s eye, a single, almost imperceptible lift of his brow. *You know this one?* it asked. *Do you want me to know him?* She gave a tiny, sharp shake of her head. Silas nodded once and resumed his work, his presence receding into the background, becoming part of the furniture. A spymaster’s retirement.
“Rory,” Evan said, his voice deeper, smoother than she remembered . It had lost its Cardiff lilt , sanded down into something neutrally metropolitan. He stopped a polite distance away, not presuming to sit. “Christ. Aurora Carter. I thought it was you.”
“Evan.” Her own voice was steady, cool. She was grateful for the Talisker, for the solidity of the bar under her palms. “Small world.”
“Isn’t it just?” He finally slid onto the stool beside her, not next to her, but one over . A buffer stool. A diplomatic demilitarized zone. He gestured to Silas. “Gin and tonic, please. Hendrick’s, if you have it.”
Silas gave a nod and turned to the bottles. The request was a statement. The Evan she’d known drank cheap lager or, on a daring night, rum and coke.
“You’re in London,” Evan said, stating the obvious as he turned back to her.
“I am. You too, apparently.”
“Five years now. Finance.” He said it like a password, granting access to a certain tier of understanding. “And you? Last I heard, you were set for the bar. Your father’s dream.”
The mention of her father, the barrister, was a deliberate probe. She saw it in the way his eyes focused on her face, looking for tells. “Plans change,” she said, lifting her glass. “I deliver Chinese food.”
He blinked. Then he laughed, a short, sharp bark that sounded genuine for the first time. “You’re joking.”
“Part-time. For a place in Chinatown. It pays the rent on the flat upstairs.” She tilted her head towards the ceiling.
His smile faded, replaced by that analytical look. He was trying to square the Aurora Carter he’d known—sharp, ambitious, top of their cohort—with a woman who delivered prawn crackers and sweet and sour pork on a scooter. He was trying to find the angle, the con. He couldn’t comprehend a lateral move that wasn’t a calculated step on a ladder. “That’s… a choice.”
“It is,” she agreed pleasantly.
Silas set the gin and tonic before him with a quiet clink. Evan took a sip, his eyes never leaving her. “You look different,” he said.
“So do you.”
“You cut your hair.”
She ran a hand through her straight, black hair, now shoulder-length where it had once fallen to the middle of her back. “It got in the way.”
“I liked it long.”
“I didn’t.”
The silence that fell was thick, charged with the ghosts of old arguments, of possessiveness masquerading as preference. He looked away first, studying the array of bottles behind the bar. “I heard about your mum. Jennifer. I’m sorry. She was a good woman.”
The mention of her mother, who had died two years after Rory fled Cardiff, was a lower blow. It bypassed her defenses, aimed for the soft, grieving core she kept buried. “Thank you,” she managed, her voice tighter .
“And your father? Brendan still terrorizing witnesses in Cardiff Crown Court?”
“Retired. Moved to Connemara. He fishes.”
“Fishes,” Evan repeated, as if it were a word in a foreign language . He took another, longer drink. “Christ, Rory. What happened?”
The question hung there, simple and devastating. *What happened to you? What happened to us? What happened to the future we were supposed to have?* The weight of time pressed down on the buffered stool between them. She could smell his cologne now, something aquatic and expensive, overlaying the faint, familiar scent of his skin. It was disorienting .
“Life happened, Evan. You of all people should know that plans… deviate.” She kept her tone light, but she saw him flinch, just a micro-expression around his eyes. He knew she wasn’t just talking about career paths.
“I suppose they do.” He spun his glass slowly on the coaster. “I think about those days sometimes. University. The law library. That awful flat with the radiator that banged all night.”
“You said it had character.”
“I was an idiot.”
Another silence . The man by the fireplace coughed. Rain pattered against the window.
“You left,” he said, finally voicing the core of it. Not *you left Cardiff *, or *you left your degree *. Just *you left *. The accusation was stripped bare.
“I did.”
“You didn’t say goodbye.”
“Would it have made a difference?” She met his gaze then, her bright blue eyes steady. She saw the boy he was for a fleeting second, buried under the layers of the polished, hard man he’d become. She saw the confusion, the hurt that had curdled, over years, into this cold, resentful curiosity.
He looked down at his hands. They were strong, clean, with neatly trimmed nails. No trace of the ink stains or bitten cuticles of his student self. “Probably not. But it would have been… civil.”
“We weren’t very civil towards the end, if you recall.”
“I recall arguments. Passionate ones. That’s what happens when two people care.”
“Is that what it was?” Her voice was a whisper now. “Caring?”
His jaw tightened. The lens was back, sealing the crack. “It felt like it to me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you were just biding your time.” He finished his drink, the ice cubes clattering. “This delivery job. Is there a… someone? Waiting upstairs?”
The question was invasive, proprietary. An old ghost flexing its muscle. She thought of the quiet of her flat, the stack of books by her bed, the peace she had carved out for herself, inch by bloody inch. “There’s just me.”
He seemed to take some small, bitter satisfaction from that. As if her solitude validated his narrative of her flight as an error, a retreat from the intensity he’d offered. He signaled Silas for another gin.
“You should have stayed,” he said, almost to himself . “You would have been brilliant. We would have been brilliant.”
The unspoken regret filled the space between them, heavier than the rain. Regret for what was, for what wasn’t, for what could never be now. He regretted the loss of the partner he’d envisioned, the accessory to the life he was building . She doubted he regretted the raised voices, the controlling comments, the way he’d tried to trim her edges to fit his frame. He’d become a man who bought Hendrick’s gin, who assessed a room for exits and advantages upon entering. The boy who loved her, however poorly, was gone . Perhaps he had never existed at all.
Silas brought the fresh drink, his hazel eyes meeting Rory’s for a fraction of a second. A silent offer: a word, a gesture, and this man would be dealt with. She gave a minute, almost invisible shake of her head. This was hers to finish.
Evan’s phone buzzed on the bar, lighting up with a notification. He glanced at it, his posture shifting immediately to alert attention. “I have to go. Meeting.”
“Of course.”
He stood, pulled a crisp twenty from a money clip and laid it on the bar. He hesitated, looking at her as if trying to memorize this new version, this anomaly in his ordered world . “It was… remarkable seeing you, Rory.”
“You too, Evan.”
He didn’t move to hug her, to kiss her cheek. The buffer stool remained an impassable gulf. He simply nodded, collected his trench coat, and walked back out into the London night, the green neon staining his retreating form for a moment before the door swung shut.
The silence he left behind was different. It felt cleaned, somehow. Resolved.
Rory lifted her Talisker, finished the last amber mouthful, the peat smoke burning a clean path down her throat. She set the glass down with a definitive click.
Silas drifted over, collecting Evan’s empty glass and the money. “Friend of yours?” he asked, his tone neutral .
“Once,” she said. “A long time ago.”
“He carries a weight ,” Silas observed, wiping the spot where the glass had been.
“Don’t we all?”
Silas allowed a faint smile. “Some learn to put it down.” He looked at her empty glass. “Another?”
“No,” Rory said, sliding off the stool. The encounter had left a strange, hollow energy in her limbs. “I think I’ll call it a night.”
She climbed the narrow stairs at the back of the bar to her flat, each step taking her further from the ghost in the trench coat. Closing her own door behind her, she leaned against it, listening to the faint sound of jazz filtering up from below. The rain whispered against her window. The face of the man at the bar, cold and reconstituted, superimposed itself for a moment over the passionate, possessive boy she’d once known. Then it faded, leaving only the quiet, solid reality of the room around her. He was a relic. She was not. The weight of time, she realized, was only heavy if you insisted on carrying it all by yourself.