Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ9345A3FA4769931ASY50J

The green neon hummed its familiar frequency, casting its sickly light across the wet pavement outside. Rory had barely glanced at it when she pushed through the door — the sign had become part of the furniture of her life, no more remarkable than the creak of the third stair up to her flat, or the smell of old wood and lemon cleaner that hit her every time she stepped inside. She was carrying her jacket over one arm and a residual headache from six hours on the delivery bike in the other, and she wanted a glass of water and a quiet corner and nothing else. The bar was half-full for a Tuesday. Silas was at the far end of the counter, polishing a glass with the methodical attention he gave to everything — the glass turning slowly in the cloth, his hazel eyes moving across the room in that way of his that looked idle and wasn't. He gave Rory a nod. She returned it and made for her usual stool. That was when she saw him. Not him. Her. The woman was sitting two stools down from where Rory had been heading, hunched slightly over a gin and tonic, her dark hair cut short now in a way that made her neck look long and exposed. She was older, obviously — but then so was Rory, and time had its own arithmetic. What struck Rory first was not the hair or the years but the posture. The girl she'd known had never hunched. She'd taken up space like she was entitled to it, which Rory had envied and quietly loved in equal measure. "Nadia." The word came out before Rory had decided to say it. Barely above the low murmur of the bar, but it was enough. The woman's head turned. There was a beat — that suspended, airless moment where recognition assembles itself across someone's face. Then Nadia Vasic smiled, and for just a second it was the old smile, the wide unreserved one, and Rory felt something shift uncomfortably in her chest. "Oh my God." Nadia set down her glass. "Rory." "What are you doing here?" "What are you—" Nadia stopped, shook her head, almost laughed. "Come here." The hug was brief and slightly awkward in the way that hugs between people who were once very close and are no longer tend to be — too much pressure applied to compensate for the distance, finished a half-second too soon. Rory sat down. Silas appeared without being asked with a second glass of something pale and set it in front of her, and she was grateful for it. "I'm visiting a colleague," Nadia said, answering the original question. "He lives around here somewhere. I came early, obviously." She gestured at the room in a way that suggested the gesture was standing in for something else. "How long have you been in London?" "Just over a year." "I didn't know. I mean — Eva mentioned you'd moved, but she didn't say where." "Eva doesn't always know what to say to whom." It came out flatter than Rory intended and she softened it with a small shrug. "I didn't exactly broadcast it." Nadia looked at her for a moment. The smile had settled into something quieter. "You look well." "So do you." It was almost true. Nadia looked like someone who had been through something and come out the other side and was still deciding what the other side was. There were new lines around her eyes, though she couldn't have been more than twenty-nine. She was dressed well — better than the Nadia that Rory remembered, who had favoured paint-stained jeans and oversized jumpers she'd bought from charity shops on principle. This Nadia wore a dark blazer with clean lines, a silk shirt beneath it. The kind of clothes you wear when you've decided to be taken seriously. "You cut your hair," Rory said. "Three years ago." Nadia touched the back of her neck briefly, unconsciously. "You kept yours." "I keep meaning to do something with it." Silas had drifted to the far end of the bar. The old maps on the walls looked down at them, coastlines and borders that no longer existed. Rory turned her glass on the counter. "The last time I saw you," she said, "you were about to go to São Paulo." "I did go to São Paulo." "And?" Nadia looked at the middle distance for a moment. "And it rained a lot. And I worked on the gallery project for eighteen months, which is what I said I was going to do. And then—" She paused, and there was a whole clause in that pause, a subordinate clause full of things with weight and edges. "And then I came back and did other things." "You're not painting anymore." It wasn't a question. Nadia looked at her sharply. "How would you know that?" "Because you used to have paint on you," Rory said. "Not just on your hands. Behind your ears, sometimes. On your elbows. And you kept checking your fingers just now the way people do when they're used to looking for something that isn't there anymore." Nadia was quiet for a moment. Around them the bar settled into itself — a low surge of laughter from a corner table, a stool scraping across the floor, the clink of ice. "When did you get so observant?" "I had a good teacher." Rory tipped her head in Silas's general direction without looking at him. Nadia followed the gesture, assessed Silas with a brief and practised look of her own. "Who is he?" "My landlord. Mostly." Nadia turned back to her. "Rory. What are you doing here? And I don't mean the bar." The question landed the way it was meant to. Rory took a sip of her drink. It was something dry and botanical, and she didn't know when Silas had started knowing her preferences well enough to choose for her, but he had. "I'm figuring things out," she said. "That's what you said four years ago." "Yes." "Well." Nadia's voice had gone careful. "Are you closer?" Rory thought about the delivery routes she could now run half-asleep. She thought about the back room behind the bookshelf, the things she'd been learning in it, the slow and serious education in how the world was actually assembled versus how it appeared from the outside. She thought about Evan, which she tried not to do, and about Cardiff, and about the person she'd been there — the person who had done Pre-Law to make her father proud and stayed too long in a relationship because leaving felt like admitting something. "I think so," she said. Nadia studied her. The short hair made her eyes look larger, or perhaps it was just that she wasn't hiding behind anything anymore, or perhaps they had both simply stopped hiding in different ways and become harder to read for it. "I'm sorry I didn't write," Nadia said. "When everything happened with—" "You don't have to." "I want to." "Nadia." Rory looked at her directly. "You were in Brazil. And I wasn't in a place where I could have read a letter anyway. Not properly." She paused. "It's fine. I mean it." The words were true. That was the strange part. She had spent a long time rehearsing this conversation in the abstract, in the dark of her flat when sleep was elusive, and in every version of it she had said something like this and not quite meant it. But sitting here now in the actual light, in the amber dimness of the Nest with the green neon bleeding in faintly through the window, she found that she did mean it. That the wound, wherever it had been, had closed over into something that was just part of the landscape now. A scar. Manageable. Like the crescent on her wrist that she'd stopped noticing years ago. Nadia looked at her for a long moment and then looked away, and the look away said more than she probably intended. It said: I have not been as fine about it as you. It said: I have thought about this too, in rooms you don't know about. It said: we were such good friends, and I let it go, and I don't know if that makes me a coward or just someone who didn't know what else to do. Rory didn't say any of that. There was no need. "Are you still in touch with Eva?" Nadia asked, after a while. "We speak. She's in Edinburgh now." "I know." Nadia smiled faintly. "She sent me a picture of her flat. A whole flat. She was so proud." "She should be." They drank. The bar moved around them at its own unhurried pace. Silas passed by once, refilled Nadia's glass without being asked, and received a slightly startled look of thanks. He acknowledged it with nothing more than a slight incline of his head and moved on. "He doesn't say much, does he," Nadia said. "He says what needs saying." "Is that an admirable quality or an annoying one?" "Yes," said Rory. Nadia almost laughed again, and this time it came out properly — a short, genuine sound, unguarded. Rory felt something loosen in her own chest. Not everything. But something. Outside, through the window with its faint green tint, London went on doing what London did. Taxis and strangers and the low bass of a city that never stopped requiring things of you. Rory wrapped both hands around her glass and listened to Nadia talk about São Paulo, the rain, the gallery, the colleague she was meeting — a hesitation there, a careful pronoun, and Rory filed that away and didn't press. There would be other things Nadia wasn't saying. There always were, with people. The bar kept its own counsel, and so did they, and the space between who they had been and who they were now sat between them like a third person at the table — acknowledged, unintroduced, belonging to them both.