AI The neon sign cast its green glow across the wet pavement, turning puddles into something luminous. Aurora pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest, escaping the October chill that had crept into London with the dusk. The bar was quieter than usual—a Tuesday, she reminded herself—and the usual murmur of conversations washed over her as she made her way toward the stool at the corner of the bar where she always sat.
Silas was polishing a glass with the unhurried precision of a man who had learned patience the hard way. He nodded as she approached, the movement barely perceptible but warm nonetheless.
"Rough day?"
"Long." She hoist herself onto the stool, letting out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "The usual."
He poured her a gin and tonic without asking—her father had raised her well, but Silas had taught her that some rituals didn't need words—and set it in front of her. She wrapped her fingers around the glass, feeling the cold seep into her palms, and let her gaze drift to the door.
That was when she saw him.
Nathan Cole had changed. The last time she'd seen him, he'd been twenty-three, gangly in that way men sometimes are when they're still growing into their frames, with floppy brown hair that always fell into his eyes and a smile that suggested he found the world perpetually amusing. That boy was gone . In his place stood a man with close-cropped hair gone grey at the temples, a jaw that had hardened with years, and eyes that had lost their laugh-lines but gained something else—a weight that hadn't been there before.
He hadn't seen her yet. He stood just inside the entrance, scanning the room with the cautious assessment of someone who expected trouble. When his gaze swept past her, she watched it continue, and then stop, and return.
The glass was cold in her hand. She realized she'd stopped breathing.
"Rory?"
She should have corrected him. Nobody called her Rory anymore—nobody except Eva, and Silas, and the ghosts of her past that she'd tried so hard to leave in Cardiff. But the name sounded right in his voice, somehow. Like a key turning in a lock she'd thought rusted shut.
"Nathan." She heard her own voice, distant, as if someone else was speaking . "What are you doing in London?"
He crossed the room in that strange, slow-motion way that things happen when the world has tilted on its axis. When he reached the bar, he stood there for a moment, not sitting, just looking at her like she was a photograph come to life.
"I could ask you the same question." He paused. "Though I suppose I already know the answer."
She lifted her drink, took a sip she didn't taste. "You do?"
"Eva called me. Six months ago. She was worried about you." He finally moved, pulling out the stool beside her and sitting down with the careful grace of a man who had learned to manage his body in ways he hadn't needed to before. "She said you'd disappeared. Stopped answering her calls."
"I've been busy."
"Busy." He repeated the word like he was testing its weight . "Is that what we're calling it?"
Silas set a whiskey in front of Nathan without being asked —another thing about this bar that Rory had never quite understood, the way it seemed to know what people needed before they did. Nathan wrapped his hand around the glass but didn't drink.
"I looked for you," he said quietly . "When you left. I asked around, called everyone I knew who might know something. Nothing. It was like you'd vanished."
"I needed to."
"Needed to vanish? Or needed to leave me behind?"
The words hung in the air between them, sharp-edged and undeniable. Rory felt something twist in her chest—a feeling she'd spent three years trying to outrun, one she'd thought she'd buried under the weight of new routines and new wounds and the slow, painstaking work of rebuilding herself from the wreckage of who she'd been.
"It wasn't about you," she said, and even to her own ears, the words sounded hollow. "It was about me. What Evan—" She stopped, swallowed . "I had to go. I had to be someone else."
"I know." Nathan's voice had softened, the hardness ebbing away to reveal something rawer underneath. "I know you did. I'm not angry, Rory. I was, for a while. But I'm not anymore."
She studied his face, looking for the lie, the accusation, the thing that had to be hiding underneath. But his eyes were clear, tired, and utterly honest.
"What happened to you?" she asked. "You look—"
"Old?"
"I was going to say different." She hesitated. "You walk differently."
He glanced down at his leg, the movement so brief she might have imagined it. "Got hit by a car in Manchester two years ago. Driver was drunk. Shattered my left knee, broke three ribs, cracked my skull open on the pavement." He said it simply, the way you might describe a minor inconvenience. "Spent four months in hospital. Another year in physio, learning to walk right again."
"Nathan—"
"It's fine. I'm fine." He gave her a small smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Made me think about a lot of things, though. Lying there, not sure if I was going to walk again. Made me realize I'd been angry at you for the wrong reasons."
"What do you mean?"
"I was angry because you left. But that's not what I should have been angry about." He turned his glass slowly between his palms, watching the amber liquid catch the light. "I was angry because you never let me help. You were going through that—that nightmare with Evan, and you never said anything. To me. To anyone who could have done something. You just disappeared into it, and then you disappeared out of it, and I never got the chance to—"
He stopped. Breath ragged. Rory watched the muscle in his jaw work.
"Get the chance to what?"
"Be there." His voice cracked on the word. "That's what I wanted. To be there. For you. And you wouldn't let me."
The truth of it hit her like a physical blow. She thought of all the times she'd seen Nathan's name on her phone during those dark months with Evan, seen his messages and his calls, and let them go unanswered. She'd told herself she was protecting him. That she was sparing him the ugliness of what her life had become. But that hadn't been the real reason, had it?
She'd been ashamed . Ashamed that she'd let herself be trapped, ashamed that she'd ignored every warning sign, every friend who told her Evan wasn't right. Ashamed that she'd become someone who needed saving.
"I didn't think you could save me," she said slowly , the words feeling like stones in her mouth. "I didn't think anyone could. I thought I was—"
"Broken?"
She met his eyes. "Yeah."
Nathan reached out, his hand coming to rest on the bar beside hers, not quite touching but close enough that she could feel the warmth of him . "You weren't broken, Rory. You were hurting. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Massive one." He picked up his whiskey, took a drink, set it down again. "Broken things stay broken. You're here. You're alive. You got out."
"I got out because Eva made me."
"Still got out. Still chose to walk through the door she opened." He tilted his head, studying her with an intensity that made her want to look away. "Why do you think you stopped calling me? After you got to London. I tried, you know. For years. I called, I texted. Nothing."
She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, she could see it: the flat she'd shared with Evan, the one with the locks that didn't work properly and the neighbours who heard everything but said nothing. She could feel the weight of her phone in her hand, the weight of Nathan's name on the screen, the weight of all the words she'd wanted to say and hadn't.
"I thought about you," she whispered. "Every day, for a long time. I thought about calling you, sending you a message, anything. But every time I tried, I just—" She opened her eyes, blinked against the sting of tears. "I didn't know how to be the person you remembered. The person who was worth saving. So I kept running."
"Rory."
"I know. It's stupid. It's—"
"Rory." His hand covered hers, warm and solid and real. "I'm not asking you to be anyone. I'm just asking you to be here. Now. With me. Like this."
She looked at their hands, his dark and scarred in places she didn't want to ask about, hers small and pale and marked with a crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist that she'd never told him the story of. Two people who had known each other when they were young and foolish and thought they had all the time in the world.
"I don't know how to do this," she admitted. "I don't know how to be someone's friend again. I don't know how to let people in."
"Neither do I." He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Maybe we can figure it out together."
Outside, the rain had started in earnest, tapping against the windows of The Raven's Nest like a patient guest asking to be let in. Inside, the neon glow held steady, green against the grey, and somewhere in the back, an old record player started up with a scratchy jazz number that neither of them recognized.
Nathan raised his glass. "To figuring it out?"
Rory lifted hers, touched the rim to his. "To figuring it out."
They drank in silence , and the silence was not empty. It was full of all the years between them, all the words they'd never said, all the distance they'd traveled to find themselves here, in this bar, on this rainy Tuesday night.
It wasn't forgiveness—not yet, maybe not ever. But it was something. A beginning. A door left open.
Rory finished her drink and signal Silas for another. When she looked at Nathan again, she found him watching her with that same expression she'd seen when he first walked in—tentative hope, cautious and guarded but undeniably there.
"Stay," she said. "I get off in an hour. There's a kebab shop two streets over that stays open till three. They do the best chips in London."
He smiled. This time it reached his eyes. "I've missed you, Rory."
She didn't say it back. She didn't have to. Instead, she slid off her stool, grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door, and turned back to face him.
"Eight o'clock. Don't be late."
And just like that, the weight of years—unspoken , unspoken , heavy with regret—shifted slightly . Not gone. Not forgotten. But shifted, making room for something new.
The door swung shut behind her, and Nathan sat alone at the bar, his hand still warm where hers had been, watching the green neon flicker against the rain-streaked window.