Run: 2026-02-18-01KHQ94AAMNYMC9GK6FG6SRPX8

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bled out onto the wet cobblestones like something wounded. Rory saw it from halfway down the street, that particular shade of emerald she'd come to associate with the smell of woodsmoke and stale ale and Silas's low voice cutting through the noise of a Friday crowd. She'd been avoiding the place all week — avoiding Silas, avoiding his careful questions — but the rain had made the decision for her, and now she pushed through the door with her jacket pulled over her head and her trainers squeaking on the threshold. The bar was half-full. The usual geography: city workers loosening their ties at the tables near the window, a cluster of students arguing over a shared plate of chips at the back. Old maps framed on the walls, faces in black-and-white photographs watching the room with expressions that never changed. Behind the bar, Silas was pouring a Guinness with the unhurried patience of a man who had once, according to him, spent eleven days in a Viennese apartment waiting for a contact who never came. He looked up when she came in. Said nothing. Raised his chin a fraction. She was already pulling off her soaked jacket and draping it over the nearest stool when she heard the voice. "Rory?" She stopped. The name hit her differently out of a different mouth. Not Rory, precisely — but the shape it made was wrong, older, like a coat that had been washed too many times. She turned. He was sitting at the far end of the bar, the corner stool where the light from the wall sconce barely reached. She wouldn't have recognised him from a distance, and perhaps that was the point. He'd lost weight everywhere except around his face, where something heavier than fat had settled. His hair, which she remembered as dark and kept long at the collar, was cropped short now and had gone mostly to grey at the temples. He was wearing a jacket she didn't recognise over a shirt she could tell used to be ironed. "Dom," she said. Dominic Farrell. She hadn't said that name aloud in four years. She turned it over in her mouth now like a coin found in an old pocket. He half-rose from the stool, and for a moment the gesture was so familiar — that particular awkward rise that was half courtesy and half reflex, the same as it had always been — that she felt something shift in her chest, some tectonic thing. "Christ," he said. "It's really you." "Apparently." She crossed the bar and sat two stools down from him, close enough not to be rude, far enough to leave herself an exit. Silas materialised with her usual and set it in front of her without a word, though his eyes moved once between her and Dom before he drifted to the other end of the bar, where he polished a glass and performed convincing disinterest. "I didn't know you were in London," Dom said. "About a year now." "I heard you'd gone back to Cardiff. After—" He stopped. Rearranged something. "After things. I heard you'd gone back." "You heard wrong." She wrapped both hands around her glass. "You're still in Manchester?" "No." He looked at the bar top. "No, I left. About two years ago." "Where, then?" "Nowhere long enough to count." He picked up his drink, set it back down without drinking. "I was in Berlin for a while. Lisbon. I'm back now, I suppose. Trying to figure out what that means." Rory watched him. She'd known Dom since they were eleven years old, had shared school lunches and exam anxiety and one disastrous camping trip in the Brecon Beacons where they'd both eaten something inadvisable from a tin. She had stood in the front row at his mother's funeral and held his hand through the whole service, and he had held hers right back. She knew the way he breathed when he was lying — the slight elevation, the overcareful voice — and she knew the way he breathed when he was telling the truth, which was quieter, and cost him more. He was telling the truth now. That was the trouble. "You look different," she said. "I know." "I don't mean that badly." "I know that too." He almost smiled. It didn't quite take. "You look the same." "I'm not." A pause. From across the bar came the sound of someone laughing too loudly, the slap of a card on a table, the low churn of music that Silas kept at a volume carefully calibrated to fill silence without interrupting thought. He had a genius for that, Rory had always thought. Managing atmospheres. "I thought about calling," Dom said. "After I heard you'd left — after everything with Evan. I thought about it a dozen times." "You didn't, though." "No." He didn't dress it up. She gave him that. "I kept thinking there'd be a right time. That I'd know when it was." "Did you ever figure it out?" "Obviously not." He looked at his hands. "I was angry at you. For a while, I was angry. I know that's not — I'm not saying it's rational. I'm not saying it's fair. You know how things get complicated." She did know. She knew that she'd stopped calling him first, the year before everything with Evan fell apart, and she knew why, and she knew that he knew why too, and neither of them had ever said the actual thing out loud. That was the problem with old friendships. They accumulated so much unsaid debris that eventually you were picking your way through a scrapyard every time you tried to reach each other. "I was angry too," she said. "For a while." He looked at her. Something in his face opened slightly, like a shutter moved by wind rather than intention. "And now?" She considered the question honestly, which was something she'd been practicing since London, since the flat above this very bar, since Silas had once said to her — sideways, in the way he said most important things — that the problem with clever people is they spend so much energy being accurate about the world that they forget to be accurate about themselves. "Now I'm mostly tired," she said. "And glad you didn't die in Lisbon or wherever." Something real crossed his face then. Not a smile exactly, but the precondition for one. "Berlin, mostly," he said. "Lisbon was only three months." "Still." "Yeah." He exhaled. "Still." The rain was picking up outside. She could hear it against the windows, that particular persistent London rain that didn't hurry and didn't apologise. Silas came back to their end of the bar and topped up her glass without being asked, and when she glanced at him he was already looking elsewhere, wearing the expression of a man who knew a great deal and had decided, for now, to keep it to himself. "Have you eaten?" Dom said. "Not yet." "There's a place." He stopped. Recalibrated. "If you want. There's a Taiwanese place on Berwick Street, they do these — it doesn't matter. If you haven't eaten." She looked at him. The grey at his temples. The jacket that might, in better light, be a decent jacket after all. The hands that had always been slightly too large for the rest of him, wrapped around a glass that had been empty for some time. She thought about the last four years, the particular geometry of loss and distance. She thought about how a friendship, untended, becomes something you have to excavate rather than inhabit. She thought about how she'd been learning, slowly and against her own instincts, to let things be somewhat more difficult and somewhat less finished than she preferred. "Yeah," she said. "All right." Outside, the green neon kept bleeding into the wet street, patient as a signal, waiting to be read.