Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ921EFX5VCVK2FSA0R5R4W

The green neon above the door had been flickering for a week. Rory kept meaning to mention it to Silas, and kept forgetting, and tonight as she pushed inside out of the October drizzle it was doing the same stuttering pulse — R-A-V-E-N, then just R-A-V, then darkness, then the whole word again, desperate and insistent. She stood for a moment in the threshold, shaking rain from her jacket, and felt the warmth of the bar close around her like a hand. Tuesday nights were quiet. A couple in the far corner nursing something amber. One man at the bar with a newspaper folded to a crossword he wasn't doing. The old maps on the walls gleamed under the low light, and the black-and-white photographs stared out from their frames with the patient indifference of the long dead. Silas was behind the bar, polishing a glass with methodical attention, and he looked up when she came in and gave a short nod that meant both hello and your usual? simultaneously. Rory had come to appreciate his economy. She climbed onto a stool and unzipped her jacket, still cold through. She'd done five deliveries in the rain, all of them to addresses where the lifts were broken, and her calves ached. She thought about nothing in particular — the crescent scar on her left wrist itching the way it sometimes did in damp weather, the essay on criminal procedure she'd been meaning to read for three days — and watched Silas set a glass of red wine in front of her without being asked. She was halfway through it when the door opened. She heard it before she looked. The particular heaviness of someone pushing through who knew the place, or used to. She turned on instinct. The woman in the doorway was tall, which Rory remembered. The hair was different — shorter now, almost severe, dark blonde gone to something more deliberately managed. She wore a coat Rory didn't recognise, expensive, a wool blend the colour of charcoal, and she carried herself with a posture that had nothing to do with the girl who used to fold herself into the corner of a sixth-form common room eating cereal out of a mug. Rory's heart did something complicated and specific, the kind of thing she'd thought she was done with. "Saoirse," she said. The name came out too quiet for the room but Saoirse heard it. She'd always had good hearing. Her eyes found Rory's — grey eyes, that hadn't changed, the particular flat grey of overcast sky — and there was a moment that lasted longer than it should have, a moment of pure exposure, before Saoirse closed the door and smiled. "Jesus," she said. "Rory Carter." She came over. They did the thing that people do when they haven't worked out what they are to each other anymore — a sort of half-embrace that resolved into Saoirse gripping Rory's arm just above the elbow, firm and brief, and then releasing. She smelled different too. Less like she used to. "What are you doing here?" Rory asked. "Having a drink, apparently." Saoirse looked around the bar with the slow survey of a person cataloguing exits. Then she sat down on the stool beside Rory without being invited, which was, Rory thought, exactly the sort of thing she would have done ten years ago and also somehow completely different now. "I'm in London for work. Two days." She glanced at Silas, who had positioned himself discreetly at the other end of the bar. "I walked past on the street and saw the sign. I used to know this place, years back." "I live here," Rory said. "Above." Saoirse turned to look at her. "You live above a bar in Soho." "I do deliveries for a restaurant down the road. It's — " Rory stopped, because she'd been about to explain herself and she didn't know why. "It's fine. It suits me." Saoirse's expression didn't change, exactly. But something in it settled, some small recalibration. "I'm not judging," she said. "I didn't say you were." Silas materialised with quiet efficiency, and Saoirse ordered a whiskey — Talisker, neat — and Rory watched the way she did it, the small precise efficiency, and thought about all the versions of Saoirse she had stored: the one who drank cheap cider on Rory's dad's back wall in Cardiff, the one who cried for two hours in the back of a taxi when her mum got sick, the one who said, six years ago over a bad phone connection, I got the position in Singapore, Rory, I actually got it, her voice high with a joy that had made Rory feel simultaneously delighted and quietly gutted in a way she'd never quite examined. "How's the work?" Rory asked. "What are you doing these days, still finance?" "Risk management. International." Saoirse turned the glass in her hand. "It's good. It's — yes. It's good." There was a pause that lasted exactly a beat too long. "And you?" Saoirse said. "Pre-law is gone then." "That was never really mine," Rory said. "You knew that." "I did," Saoirse agreed. "I used to tell you that. Every time you called me at midnight complaining about your contract law module." "You told me to drop out and travel. Very useful advice." "I was twenty-two." Something shifted in Saoirse's voice, a ghost of the old dry humour, and for a second the bar felt warmer. "Neither of us was particularly useful at twenty-two." Rory smiled, which she hadn't meant to. They sat for a moment without talking. Outside, the rain intensified against the windows, and the neon sign cast its flickering green through the glass and onto the floorboards in irregular pulses. The man with the crossword had given up on it. The couple in the corner were quiet now, leaning together in the way people do when they've run out of things to say in a good way rather than a bad one. "I heard about Evan," Saoirse said, finally. Rory's hand tightened on the stem of her glass. "Did you." "Eva mentioned it. About a year after you'd left Cardiff." Saoirse wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the bar top, at the grain of the old wood. "I should have called. I thought about it. I had your number written down and then I lost it, and then I thought — I don't know what I thought. That it was too late. That I'd left it too long." Rory said nothing. The scar on her wrist itched. "I'm sorry," Saoirse said. It came out without embellishment, without the soft architecture of qualification that people usually built around that word. Just the two syllables, level and plain, and Rory understood that it was carrying several years' weight. She looked at the woman beside her — the expensive coat, the careful hair, the grey eyes that were exactly the same as they had ever been — and felt the distance between them not as absence but as substance, the way silence is a sound. "You didn't know," Rory said. "I didn't tell anyone properly. I went quiet." She paused. "I'm good at going quiet." "You always were." "And you were always good at leaving." She said it without cruelty, or tried to. Whether she succeeded she wasn't sure. "I don't mean it badly, Saoirse. I just mean — Singapore, then Hong Kong, then wherever you are now —" "Zurich," Saoirse said quietly. "Zurich. Right." Rory let out a slow breath. "You were always chasing the next thing. I used to think I was jealous of that. I think now maybe I was just scared of it. That it was so easy for you to go." Saoirse's jaw tightened, a small involuntary movement. "It wasn't easy," she said. "I just didn't show you what it cost." The rain outside. The sign. R-A-V-E-N, darkness, R-A-V-E-N. Rory thought about all the conversations they hadn't had, laid end to end like closed doors down a long corridor. The phone calls that had gradually thinned — monthly, then quarterly, then the occasional birthday message, then a like on a photograph that was a kind of poverty dressed up as connection. She thought about how grief for a living person was the strangest kind, how you mourned someone who was still entirely real, still ordering Talisker neat somewhere in the world, still existing beyond the edges of your own life. "I've missed you," she said. Not past tense. Present, ongoing. Saoirse looked at her then, and for a moment she was twenty-two again, or seventeen, or whatever age it was when she and Rory had sat on a Cardiff rooftop and made promises with the credulous confidence of people who didn't yet know how fast everything moved. The careful posture softened, almost imperceptibly. "I've missed you too," she said. "I've just been — I've been very bad at it." Silas was down at the other end of the bar, occupying himself with something that did not require his attention, and Rory was grateful for him in a way she couldn't have articulated. She turned back to her wine. "You're in London for two days," she said. "Yes." "Tomorrow night. I get off at seven." She kept her voice neutral, matter-of-fact, the way she'd learned to be about things she actually wanted. "We could eat. Yu-Fei does a half-price staff meal if you come at the right time." Saoirse looked at her for a moment. Then she lifted her whiskey glass and tilted it in Rory's direction — a fractional gesture, almost nothing. "Yeah," she said. "Alright." The sign flickered on outside. The rain came down. Somewhere above them, Rory's flat was small and warm and exactly hers, and she sat in her barstool and felt the quiet, imperfect weight of a door that had not, after all, been closed.