AI The green neon sign buzzed like a trapped insect above the door, casting a sickly, familiar glow on the wet pavement of Soho. Inside The Raven’s Nest, the air was thick with the smell of old wood, spilled whiskey, and the faint, ever-present scent of Silas’s polish. Rory wiped a strand of damp, black hair from her forehead, the cool of the evening still clinging to her delivery jacket. She’d just dropped off the last order for Yu-Fei, a complicated spread of dumplings and tea-smoked duck to a nervous-looking man in a Mayfair townhouse, and her feet ached. The bar was her sanctuary , the flat above it her refuge. It was Tuesday, quiet, just a few regulars hunched over their drinks in the dim, map-lined gloom .
Silas was at the far end, polishing a glass with a methodical , military precision. He glanced up as she entered, his hazel eyes missing nothing. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod towards his usual table—a silent offer of a post-shift drink. She shook her head, a small smile touching her lips. Not tonight. She just wanted the anonymity of a corner, the weight off her feet, a single gin and tonic to blur the sharp edges of the day. She shrugged off her jacket, the small crescent scar on her left wrist catching the low light as she draped it over the back of a stool at an empty table near the bookshelf that wasn’t really a bookshelf.
She’d just taken her first sip, the cold juniper bite a relief, when the door opened again, bringing with it a gust of damp, city-smelling air and a man.
He was tall, wearing a expensive but slightly rumpled charcoal coat, his fair hair thinning at the temples. He scanned the room with an academic’s mild confusion, his eyes passing over her, then snapping back. They widened. A slow, disbelieving smile spread across his face, a smile she remembered from library study sessions and terrible student parties, a smile that belonged to a different lifetime.
“Aurora Carter?”
The voice was deeper, but the cadence was the same. Oliver. Oliver Finch. They’d been in the same Pre-Law cohort at Cardiff. He’d been the one who could quote obscure legal precedents but couldn’t work the library printer, who’d had a hopeless, gentle crush on her that she’d been too busy, too focused, too entangled with Evan to properly notice or kindly discourage.
For a second, the cool-headed persona she’d cultivated, the one Silas had helped temper into something like steel, threatened to crack . She felt a lurch, a dizzying sense of temporal whiplash. Here was Cardiff. Here was the lecture hall, the smell of cheap coffee and highlighter pens, the weight of her father’s expectations. Here, standing in Silas’s bar of shadows and secrets, was a ghost of the girl she’d been before London, before the flat above the bar, before the delivery bike and the hidden room behind the bookcase.
“Oliver,” she said, and was surprised at how level her voice sounded. “God. Hi.”
He was already crossing the room, his hand outstretched before he seemed to think better of it and switched to an awkward half-wave. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing in London? Last I heard you were… well, no one really heard.” He pulled out the chair opposite without asking, his movements still that same blend of eagerness and clumsiness.
“I live here,” she said simply, taking another sip of her drink. She could feel Silas’s attention from the bar, a quiet, observational pressure.
“You live here? In this bar?”
“Above it.” She gestured vaguely towards the ceiling.
Oliver’s gaze swept over her, taking in the practical jeans, the simple t-shirt, the lack of makeup, the tired but sharp look in her bright blue eyes. It was different from the assessing, possessive looks Evan used to give her. This was pure, unadulterated confusion. “You look… different,” he finally said, then flushed. “I mean, good! You look good. Just… it’s been years.”
“Five,” Rory said. “Almost six.” The last time she’d seen him was at a graduation party she’d left early because Evan had texted, his messages sharp with impatience.
“So you never… you didn’t finish your articles? Your dad, Brendan, he was always so proud, talking you up to anyone who’d listen.” Oliver flagged down Silas, who approached with his slight, deliberate limp. “Uh, a pint of whatever’s good, please.” Silas’s gaze flickered to Rory, a silent question. She gave a tiny, almost invisible shake of her head. *He’s harmless.* Silas retreated.
The mention of her father was a small, precise needle to the heart. “Plans change,” she said, her tone leaving no room for further inquiry .
Oliver seemed not to notice. He was launched now, back in that safe past. “Do you remember Professor Callahan’s torts class? That terrible moot court where I mixed up *res ipsa loquitur * with *ratio decidendi *? You saved me, whispered the right term from the second row.” He laughed, a bright, unguarded sound that seemed alien in the Nest’s hushed atmosphere. “You were always the sharpest of us. I thought for sure you’d be a barrister by now, taking on the Crown Court.”
Rory traced the rim of her glass. The cool-headed, out-of-the-box thinker she was known for now was calculating the emotional distance between this memory and her reality. The gap felt like a chasm . “I deliver food for a Chinese restaurant,” she said, watching his face.
He blinked. The smile didn’t vanish, but it froze, then reconfigured itself into an expression of polite, bewildered concern. “Oh. Right. A… a gap year sort of thing? Saving up for more school?”
“It’s a job. It pays the rent.” She heard the defensiveness in her own voice and hated it. This was why she’d cut ties. This exact look. The uncomprehending pity.
His pint arrived. He took a long drink, buying time. “And Evan? Are you two…?”
“No.” The word was final, a door slammed shut. The silence that followed was heavy with everything she didn’t say. The fear, the strategic retreat, the midnight flight to London on Eva’s insistence, the months looking over her shoulder.
Oliver studied her face, and for the first time, she saw the ghost of the intelligent, observant man he might have become beneath the awkward boy he’d been. He saw the wariness in her eyes, the way she held herself, coiled and ready even in repose. He saw the absence of the ambitious, slightly brittle law student he’d known.
“You’re different, Aurora,” he said again, softly this time. Not an accusation, not even confusion. A statement.
“It’s Rory,” she corrected. “Most people call me Rory now.”
“Rory.” He tested the name. It sounded like a stranger’s name on his lips . “It suits you better, I think. Less… gilt-edged.”
She almost smiled at that. “Less expected.”
He nodded, looking down into his pint. “I qualified last year. Family law. It’s… it’s good. Hard, but good. I’m in town for a conference.” He was offering his life up, a tidy parcel of achieved expectations, hoping to trade it for hers. But hers wasn’t a parcel; it was a locked box, and she’d thrown away the key.
“Congratulations,” she said, and meant it. The Oliver she remembered deserved that. The Rory she was now knew she could never have it, and, in her darkest, most honest moments, was glad of it. The law, to her, was no longer an abstract system of justice; it was the thing Evan had threatened to use against her, the structure her father had seen as the only valid path. It was a cage she’d escaped.
“It’s not too late, you know,” he said, leaning forward, his voice earnest. “You could pick it up again. You were brilliant. With your mind… you could do anything.”
The weight of time settled between them, not as nostalgia, but as a ledger of diverging costs . His was the weight of casebooks and long hours, of a life unfolding on a predictable , respectable graph. Hers was the weight of a packed bag by the door, of learning to read the micro-expressions on a stranger’s face in a Mayfair hallway, of the silent, understanding nod from a retired spymaster. His regret was for a potential unfulfilled. Hers was for a self she’d had to dismantle to survive.
“I *am * doing something,” she said, and her voice had a new firmness. She wasn’t the girl from Cardiff anymore. She was the woman who lived above Silas Blackwood’s bar. “It just doesn’t look like what you thought it would.”
Oliver sat back, defeated not by her anger, but by her certainty . He finished his pint. “I’m glad I ran into you, Aurora. Rory. Truly. It’s good to see you… well.”
She knew he didn’t think she was well. He thought she was lost. That was the unspoken regret that filled the space between them: his regret for the path she’d lost, and her regret for the fact that he could never understand the value of the ground she now stood on, even if it was in a dimly lit bar, scarred and serving others.
“It was good to see you too, Oliver,” she said, and for a moment, she almost meant it.
He left money on the table for his drink, gave her one last, complicated look—a farewell to the person he remembered—and walked back out into the London night. The green neon buzzed as the door closed behind him.
Silas appeared a moment later, clearing the empty pint glass. He didn’t speak. He just paused, his silver signet ring glinting dully as he placed a fresh gin and tonic in front of her, on the house. His hazel eyes met hers, and in them was no pity, no confusion. Only recognition. He saw the cost, and he saw the strength it had purchased. He gave her a slight nod, then turned and limped back to his station, leaving her alone with the ghost of who she’d been, which finally, in the quiet of The Raven’s Nest, felt like it was laid to rest .