Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ93F7VTCBSQT08740Q7AJA

The green neon sign bled through the window glass and painted the bar in a sickly, beautiful light. Rory had learned to stop seeing it after six months of living above it, the way you stop hearing traffic or the couple next door arguing about the washing up. But tonight the colour caught her off guard when she came downstairs after her shift, still smelling of takeaway boxes and engine fumes, and she stood for a moment in the doorway just looking at the room. Wednesday nights were quiet at the Nest. A couple sharing a bottle at the far table. A man reading a paperback alone at the bar, halfway through a pint he'd clearly forgotten about. Silas moving behind the counter with that unhurried economy he had, as though every motion had been decided well in advance. She'd just taken her usual stool — second from the left, habit — and was shrugging off her jacket when she heard it. "Rory?" The voice came from the corner booth. It landed somewhere between her shoulder blades and stopped her cold. She turned slowly, because she already knew. Voices don't change the way faces do. They stay the same age, preserve themselves in amber, and you recognise them twenty years later in the dark without any trouble at all. Daniel Marsh was standing up from the booth. Taller than she remembered, which didn't make sense, but there it was. He was thirty now, or nearly — the same as she'd last calculated him in the back of her mind — but he wore it differently than she'd imagined. His hair was cut close on the sides now, neat and professional, and he had the kind of careful posture that people developed when they were working hard not to look uncomfortable in their own skin. He was wearing a jacket that cost money. She noticed the jacket specifically, because the Daniel Marsh she'd known at eighteen had owned two jumpers and a coat with a broken zip and had been deeply, cheerfully unconcerned about it. "Dan," she said. It came out flat. Not coldly — she didn't mean it coldly — but she heard it land that way and watched him register it. "I didn't know you were in London," he said, still standing, half out of the booth, as though he'd stood up automatically and hadn't quite committed to the full gesture yet. "Few months now." She crossed the distance between them because it seemed rude not to, and they did the brief awkward calculation of what kind of greeting they were — a hug, it turned out, short and slightly too careful. He smelled of something expensive. "You?" "Two years." He sat back down. After a moment she slid into the bench opposite. "I'm at Hargreaves now. The firm on Bishopsgate." She nodded. Hargreaves. She knew the name. Her father would have known the name immediately and said something about it that she didn't want to hear. "Solicitor?" "Corporate," he said, with a small almost-smile. "Don't judge me." "I'm not." "You are, a little." She wasn't, actually. That was the strange thing. She'd expected to be. The Daniel she'd kept filed away in some drawer of her memory had been studying environmental sciences at Edinburgh, furious about planning permission cases and Scottish land rights, eating pasta five nights a week and spending the other two arguing about it in the pub. He'd been going to change something. She'd believed that completely, with the unselfconscious certainty you had about the people you loved at eighteen, before you understood that certainty was just another word for not knowing yet. She looked at him now and felt something more complicated than judgment. Closer to grief, maybe. Or recognition. "How's Edinburgh?" she asked, though she suspected she already knew the answer. "I'm not — I haven't been back in a while." He picked up his glass, looked at it. "My mum's still there. I get up for Christmas." Silas appeared at the edge of the table without being summoned, because he had an operative's instinct for where he was needed. He looked at Rory with a brief, unreadable expression — she'd learned to read his brief, unreadable expressions, and this one asked if she was alright without asking — and then at Daniel with the polite, professional appraisal he gave everyone new. "Get you something?" Silas said. "Same again," Dan said, gesturing at his glass. "Rory?" "Whatever's open," she said. Silas withdrew. She watched Dan watching him go, the slight frown of someone trying to categorise a person and finding the categories insufficient. "Friend of yours?" Dan said. "Landlord." "Right." He looked around the bar properly for the first time, taking in the old maps and the photographs, the green wash from outside. "Interesting place." "It grows on you." A silence settled between them. Not a comfortable one, but not hostile either. The particular silence of two people remembering the same years from different angles. "I heard you left Cardiff," he said. "Your mum mentioned it to mine." Of course she had. She kept her voice steady. "Couple of years ago." "Is it — are you doing alright?" The question was careful. She'd been asked it carefully by enough people to know what it meant. It meant: we heard things. It meant: we didn't know what to say. It meant: we should have called. "I'm fine," she said, and then, because she was tired of giving that answer and watching it accepted too quickly: "I work for a restaurant. Deliveries. It's temporary." "Right." He nodded. He didn't ask about the law degree, and she was grateful enough for that to soften slightly. "What happened to the environmental work?" she asked. "The planning stuff. You were going to do something with that." He smiled, and it was almost the old smile — slightly crooked, self-deprecating — but quieter now, like a fire that had learned to bank itself low. "Life happened to it, I suppose. The money wasn't — I had loans. You know how it is." "I know how it is," she said. "Hargreaves isn't forever," he said, though his voice didn't believe it. Silas set their drinks down. She wrapped her hands around her glass and felt the cold of it, grounding. Outside on the street someone laughed loudly and it was swallowed by the city. "Do you remember," Dan said suddenly, "that night at the Senedd? The vigil thing." She did. She remembered exactly. November, six years ago, standing on the grey stones outside the Senedd building in Cardiff Bay with a candle in a paper cup, rain working at it steadily. They'd been there for four hours. She'd been outraged and idealistic and so entirely sure of herself it made her wince to think about it now, but the wincing was fond. Some part of her would always be standing on those stones. "You gave a speech," she said. "God." He covered his face with one hand briefly. "I did. In the rain." "It was good," she said honestly. "You were angry. It was good." He looked at her from behind his hand, then lowered it. "You cried." "I did not." "You did. You tried to hide it." She had, in fact. She remembered that too. She'd been standing just behind him when he spoke and she'd been crying and she'd stared at the back of his head and told herself it was the cold. It wasn't the cold. "You were seventeen," she said. "Seventeen and standing in the November rain reading from handwritten notes about public land access rights and you weren't embarrassed at all." "I was absolutely embarrassed," he said. "I was terrified." "You didn't look it." He was quiet for a moment. In the silence she could hear the low conversation from the couple in the corner, the periodic soft knock of Silas moving bottles behind the bar. "I miss him," Dan said finally. "That version of me. Which is a strange thing to say, I know." She looked at him carefully. "It's not strange." "I just—" He turned his glass slowly on the table. "I kept waiting for it to feel like a compromise. Like I'd notice the moment I'd sold something off. But it didn't feel like a moment. It was just — a lot of small decisions that seemed reasonable, and then one day you're at a firm on Bishopsgate and your suit costs more than your first year's rent and you can't quite trace back the route you took to get there." She thought about Evan. About Cardiff. About the way she'd told herself, a hundred small times, that it wasn't so bad, until the sum of all those hundred small times was something very bad indeed. She thought about the Pre-Law books still in a box in her room upstairs, which she hadn't opened and couldn't quite throw away. "I know," she said. "I know exactly what you mean." He looked at her properly then, for the first time. Not at her coat or her flat affect or whatever story he'd been piecing together about who she was now. He looked at her the way he used to look at her, like she was someone worth looking at carefully. "We were very sure of ourselves," he said. "We were." "I don't think I'd trade it. Even now." She thought about the vigil. The cold stones. The way the candle flame fought the rain and kept winning, improbably, for an unreasonable amount of time. "No," she agreed. "I don't think I would either." They sat with that for a while. The neon light moved faintly as something passed on the street outside, and the room rearranged itself in green and shadow, and neither of them rushed to fill the quiet, because there was something in it that was almost, almost like being eighteen again, which was the closest either of them was ever going to get.