Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ91DEJF9BM2DN93CTD62XS

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bled into the wet pavement outside, and Rory stood beneath it for a moment longer than she needed to, letting the drizzle settle into her hair. It had been a long shift — three deliveries cancelled, one address that turned out to be a car park, and her bicycle chain coming loose on Greek Street — and the light above the door was the closest thing she had to a welcome mat. She pushed inside. The Nest on a Tuesday was a particular kind of quiet. Three men at the far end of the bar nursing pints with the focused desperation of people who needed somewhere to be. A couple in the corner sharing a bottle of red and not speaking. The old maps on the walls caught the amber light the way they always did, making the room feel like the inside of something antique, something that had been sealed and forgotten and then cracked open. Rory liked that about it. She liked that it asked nothing of her. She was halfway to the bar when she stopped. The woman sitting on the third stool from the left had her back to the room, but Rory knew the shape of those shoulders. Knew the way the head tilted slightly to the right when its owner was thinking too hard about something. Knew the particular arrangement of dark blond hair, longer now, pulled into a knot that was already coming loose. Six years. Six years and some months and a version of herself she'd largely managed to box and store somewhere high and inaccessible. She could leave. She'd come through the door but she could turn and go back out into the rain and come back in twenty minutes and the woman would be gone, or she'd have shifted seats, or Rory would have become someone capable of walking past her without her chest doing whatever it was currently doing. She didn't leave. "Priya." The woman turned, and there it was — that half-second of processing, the eyes going through several rapid recalibrations before landing on recognition. Then a smile, the kind that arrived before the person had decided whether they meant it. "Oh my God." Priya slid off the stool and they did the thing — the hug that was slightly too brief, the pulling back to look at each other, the mutual assessment dressed up as warmth. "Rory. What are you — do you live near here?" "Above here, actually." Rory nodded at the ceiling. "I rent the flat upstairs." "You live above a bar." "I live above *this* bar. There's a distinction." Priya laughed, and it sounded right. It sounded like her. Rory sat down two stools along and flagged for Silas, who had already appeared at the far end of the bar with the unhurried efficiency of a man who noticed everything and commented on very little. He met Rory's eyes. She held up two fingers and he gave a small nod. "How long have you been in London?" Rory asked. "Three weeks. Maybe four." Priya was wearing a silk blouse the colour of old bronze, and her wrists were stacked with thin gold bangles that hadn't been there before. The Priya that Rory remembered had worn beaten-up Converse and a charity-shop leather jacket and had once given her last twenty pounds to a man busking outside Cardiff Central because he was playing Sufjan Stevens and she said that deserved rewarding. "I'm consulting for a firm in Mayfair. Corporate ethics, of all things." She tilted her head at herself, self-deprecating. "I know." "Corporate ethics," Rory said. "Someone has to do it." Silas set two glasses of Jameson in front of them and withdrew without a word. Rory wrapped her fingers around the glass and felt the familiar geometry of it, the weight. "Cardiff feels like a very long time ago," Priya said. "It was." "You left pretty suddenly." She said it lightly, conversationally, the way you might mention the weather, and Rory recognised the technique — she'd used it herself. The deliberately casual delivery of something that wasn't casual at all. "I did," Rory said. "Things were — I needed to go." "Because of Evan." It wasn't a question. Rory looked at the amber in her glass and then at the photograph on the wall across from her: two men in suits standing outside a building somewhere continental, their faces blurred just slightly by the vintage resolution of the print. She'd always wondered about them. What the building was. Whether they'd known each other well or barely at all. "Partly," she said. "And partly because I wasn't — I wasn't doing well. In general. And Cardiff felt like a place where I was very visible and very stuck and London felt like somewhere I could be nobody for a while." She paused. "I needed to be nobody for a while." Priya was quiet. The couple in the corner had started talking now, low and urgent, leaning towards each other across the wine bottle like something had shifted. One of the men at the far end said something and the others laughed, and the sound was thick and comfortable, the sound of a joke with a long history. "I thought you were angry with me," Priya said. "When you left without — I mean, you sent a text. You sent me a text saying you were going." "I know." "We were best friends, Rory." "I know." She set the glass down and turned on the stool to face her properly. Priya looked — Rory searched for the word and couldn't find one that wasn't reductive. She looked completed, maybe. Some version of herself that had been sketched in and was now fully rendered. The bangles. The silk. The ease in the spine that hadn't been there before. But around the eyes there was something watchful, something that knew what it was doing at all times, and Rory wasn't sure that had been there before either. "I wasn't angry with you. I was embarrassed. I was — I'd let you watch me be small for a very long time and I needed to stop being watched." The silence between them had texture. Not uncomfortable, exactly, but not weightless either. "I'm sorry," Rory said. "That I didn't say goodbye properly. I've thought about it. I think I owe you that one." "You do," Priya said. And then, after a beat: "But I get it. I think I got it at the time. I was just —" She looked down at her bangles and turned one of them absently. "Hurt. I was hurt. And then the hurt became a habit and then the habit became just — background noise." "Are you happy?" Rory asked. She hadn't meant to ask it so directly and she could tell from the slight flinch that Priya hadn't expected it either. "Most days." Priya picked up her glass. "Are you?" "Getting there." "That's a good answer," Priya said, and this time the smile was different — smaller, slower, without any performance in it. The kind that came from somewhere underneath rather than from the surface. "That's actually a really good answer." Outside, the rain was picking up. Rory could hear it at the edges of the room, a low persistent sound against the windows, the city doing what it did. Silas moved behind the bar, unhurried, polishing a glass with a white cloth, and the green light of the sign fell across the old maps and the black-and-white photographs, and the couple in the corner were laughing now at whatever had been urgent a moment before. "Tell me something true," Rory said. It had been their thing, years ago, the question they asked each other when they needed to cut through. She hadn't said it to anyone since. Priya looked at her for a long moment, the bangles still, the watchfulness around her eyes giving way to something quieter. "I almost called you," she said. "Twice. Once when my dad was sick. Once on your birthday." She paused. "Both times I didn't. And both times I thought about it for days afterward." Rory nodded slowly. "Me too," she said. "Different occasions. Same result." They sat with that. Outside, the rain pressed on. Inside, the Nest held them in its amber light, the way it held everyone — without judgment, without urgency, just the old maps and the photographs of strangers and the low warm sound of people who had somewhere to be.