AI The Raven's Nest smelled the same as it always had—wood polish, cigarette smoke that had seeped into the walls decades before the ban, and something vaguely maritime that Rory had never been able to identify. She pushed through the door at half past nine, her delivery bag slung over one shoulder, the remnants of cold December rain still clinging to her jacket.
Silas nodded from behind the bar, already reaching for a glass. "Rough night?"
"Mrs. Pemberton on Frith Street tipped me in coins again. Thirty-seven pence." Rory slid onto her usual stool, the leather cracked in a familiar pattern beneath her. "I think she's doing it on purpose now."
"She is. Told me last week she likes watching young people count change. Says it builds character."
"Character." Rory accepted the whiskey he poured without asking. "I've got plenty of that already."
The bar was quiet for a Thursday, only a handful of patrons scattered across the dim space. A couple argued in hushed tones near the window, their reflections ghostly against the rain-streaked glass. An old man Rory didn't recognize sat alone beneath a photograph of the Berlin Wall, nursing something amber and staring at nothing.
She was halfway through her drink when the door opened again.
The woman who entered carried herself like someone accustomed to being watched. Tall, blonde hair swept back in a style that probably cost more than Rory's monthly rent, wearing a coat that definitely did. She paused just inside the threshold, scanning the room with the practiced casualness of a person looking for someone specific while pretending not to.
Rory's glass stopped halfway to her lips.
The woman's gaze swept past her, then snapped back. Something flickered across her face—surprise, recognition, and then a careful blankness that settled over her features like a mask being lowered .
"Aurora?"
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water. Nobody called her that anymore. Not since Cardiff. Not since—
"Megan."
Megan Holloway crossed the room in six measured steps, heels clicking against the worn hardwood. Up close, Rory could see the changes more clearly: the subtle work around her eyes, the careful contouring that made her cheekbones knife-sharp, the way she held her shoulders back as if bracing against an invisible wind . The Megan she'd known at university had been softer. Louder. Quick to laugh, quicker to cry, perpetually late to lectures and perpetually borrowing Rory's notes.
This woman looked like she'd never been late to anything in her life.
"I didn't—" Megan paused, recalibrating . "I didn't expect to see you here."
"I live upstairs."
"In Soho?"
"Above the bar, specifically." Rory gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "The commute's excellent."
Megan glanced around the Raven's Nest as if seeing it properly for the first time, her gaze catching on the old maps, the black-and-white photographs, the green neon glow from the sign outside painting everything in sickly light . Whatever she'd been looking for when she walked in, this clearly wasn't it.
"Can I—" She gestured at the empty stool beside Rory. "Just for a moment. I'm meeting someone, but they're not here yet."
Rory nodded. Silas materialized with the silent efficiency that still occasionally unnerved her, took Megan's order—a gin and tonic, top shelf, specify the brand—and retreated to the far end of the bar where he could pretend not to listen while absolutely listening.
"So," Megan said. "London."
"London."
"I thought you were going to—" She stopped, took a careful sip of her drink. "Your father always talked about you joining his firm. Carter & Associates. I remember he had the business cards printed before you'd even finished your A-levels."
"I remember."
"What happened?"
Rory turned her glass slowly , watching light refract through amber liquid. What happened. Such a simple question for such a complicated answer. What happened was Evan with his charming smile and his careful isolation, his way of making her feel like the problem was always her. What happened was two years of shrinking herself to fit into spaces that kept getting smaller. What happened was Eva's voice on the phone at three in the morning, saying *just get on the train, Rory, I don't care about the rest, just get on the train.*
"Life," she said. "Life happened."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Megan studied her with an expression Rory couldn't quite read . The old Megan had been transparent, every emotion splashed across her face in real time. This version kept her cards closer.
"You look different," Megan said finally.
"So do you."
"I mean—" She made a vague gesture . "You look tired. But also... I don't know. Settled? You always seemed like you were vibrating at a frequency the rest of us couldn't quite hear. Like you were already somewhere else in your head."
"And now?"
"Now you look like you're actually here."
Rory didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing. She traced the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a childhood accident she barely remembered—falling off her bike, the edge of a broken bottle, her mother's panicked drive to A&E. Funny, the marks that stayed.
"I saw your wedding announcement," she said. "Three years ago? Four? In the Telegraph."
Megan's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around her glass. "Four. You didn't send a card."
"I didn't have your address."
"You could have asked my mother."
"Could have. Didn't."
The silence stretched between them, filled with the low murmur of the arguing couple, the clink of ice in the old man's glass, the distant sound of traffic on the rain-slicked street outside. Silas polished the same glass he'd been polishing for five minutes, his attention carefully elsewhere.
"James and I separated last spring," Megan said. "The divorce finalized in October."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I'm not." She took another sip, longer this time. "He was a perfectly acceptable husband. That was the problem. Everything was perfectly acceptable. The house in Kensington, the holidays in Monaco, the conversations we'd already had a thousand times before. I woke up one morning and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd surprised myself."
"So you surprised yourself."
"I left. Moved out while he was at a conference in Singapore. Very dramatic. Very unlike me." A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "Or unlike who I'd become, anyway. I'm not sure there's much difference anymore."
Rory thought about the Megan she'd known—the one who'd organized protests outside the student union, who'd dyed her hair purple on a dare, who'd once convinced their entire ethics seminar to walk out in solidarity with striking cafeteria workers. That Megan had burned so bright it sometimes hurt to look at her.
"What happened to the foundation?" Rory asked. "You were going to start a nonprofit. Something about education access for—"
"Rural Welsh communities, yes." Megan's jaw tightened. "James thought it wasn't practical. He had connections at his firm who could help me find something more... suitable. So I found something suitable. Fundraising for the symphony . Very respectable. Very pointless."
"And now?"
"Now I'm thirty-two years old, sitting in a bar in Soho, waiting for a man I met on an app to show up for a drink I don't actually want." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "The sad part is I can't even blame anyone else. Every choice was mine. Every compromise. Every time I told myself *this is just temporary, this is just until, this is just—*"
She broke off, staring into her glass.
"I used to be someone," she said quietly . "I remember being someone. And then I woke up and I was this... hollow thing. This perfectly polished hollow thing."
Rory remembered the last time she'd seen Megan—a crowded pub near campus, celebrating the end of exams, both of them drunk on cheap wine and the certainty that their futures were infinite. Megan had grabbed her arm and said, *We're going to change the world, Aurora. You and me. They won't know what hit them.*
That was six years ago. Six years, and now they were strangers sharing a bar and the wreckage of who they'd meant to be.
"I think about you sometimes," Megan said. "I think about that night in the library when we stayed up until four writing manifestos about everything we were going to do differently. All the ways we were going to be braver than our parents, truer than the people we saw settling into their safe little lives." She turned to face Rory fully. "I think about how certain I was."
"We were twenty. Everyone's certain at twenty."
"Were you?"
Rory thought about the girl she'd been—the one who'd already learned to read her father's moods, to anticipate what he wanted to hear, to excel precisely because excelling was the only currency that bought her breathing room. She'd been certain of nothing except her own ability to perform certainty.
"No," she said. "But I was good at pretending."
"You were good at everything." Megan's voice carried an edge that surprised her. "That was the thing about you. Top of every class, everyone's favorite student, even the professors who hated admitting a twenty-year-old had better insights than they did. You were going to be something extraordinary, Aurora. And now you're—"
"Delivering takeaway and living above a bar?"
"I didn't mean—"
"You did. It's fine." Rory finished her whiskey, set the glass down with a soft click. "You're not wrong. By any objective measure, I've failed spectacularly. No law degree. No prestigious career. I count my tips in coins and I own approximately three pieces of furniture that don't belong to my landlord." She nodded toward Silas, who raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment. "But I sleep through the night now. Most nights. I eat meals when I'm hungry instead of when I've earned them. I have one friend who actually knows me, and a boss who pays me in cash and doesn't ask questions, and a small, quiet life that belongs entirely to me."
She turned to face Megan, meeting her gaze directly.
"You asked what happened. A man happened. A man who was very charming and very careful and who taught me exactly how small I could make myself before I stopped existing altogether. And getting out—getting here—took everything I had left. So no, I'm not extraordinary. I'm not changing the world. I'm just alive. And for a while, that wasn't a guarantee."
The words hung between them, raw and heavy. Megan's carefully composed expression cracked, just slightly , around the edges.
"Aurora, I—"
"Rory." She softened her voice . "Nobody calls me Aurora anymore."
"Rory." Megan repeated it like she was learning a new word. "I didn't know. About any of it. You just... vanished. I tried to find you, at first. Your parents said you'd moved, wouldn't say where. Eva wouldn't return my calls."
"Eva was protecting me. My parents were embarrassed." Rory shrugged. "Standard responses, really ."
"I should have tried harder."
"Maybe. Or maybe I needed to disappear completely before I could figure out how to come back."
The door opened again, admitting a gust of cold air and a man in an expensive coat who scanned the room with obvious impatience. Megan glanced over, then back at Rory.
"That's him," she said, but she didn't move.
"Go. Have your drink."
"I don't want to have my drink. I want—" She stopped, pressed her lips together. "I want to go back. To that night in the library. To being twenty and certain and believing we could be anything."
"We can't."
"I know." Megan pulled out a card—thick cream stock, embossed letters—and slid it across the bar. "My new number. My real number, not the one that goes through my assistant. I know it's been years. I know I'm practically a stranger now. But if you ever—if you want to—"
She left the sentence unfinished, which Rory appreciated. Some invitations were too fragile for complete sentences.
"I'll think about it."
Megan stood, gathering her coat and her composure with equal care. She paused, one hand on the back of the stool.
"For what it's worth," she said quietly , "I think surviving is extraordinary. I think being alive is plenty. And I think the world changes whether we mean it to or not—one choice at a time, one person at a time, one night in a bar at a time."
She walked toward the waiting man without looking back. Rory watched her go, watched her slip back into the polished exterior she wore like armor, watched her smile and shake hands and become, once again, someone she probably didn't recognize.
Silas appeared at her elbow with another whiskey, unasked for.
"Old friend?"
"Something like that."
"Seemed like a complicated conversation."
Rory picked up the business card, turned it over in her fingers. Megan's new surname—back to Holloway, she noticed—in elegant script above a phone number and nothing else. No job title. No company. Just a name and a way to reach her.
"Most conversations are," she said, "when you actually have them."
She tucked the card into her pocket. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the green neon sign cast long shadows across the wet pavement. Tomorrow she'd deliver more takeaway. Count more coins. Live her small, quiet life that belonged entirely to her.
But tonight, she sat in a bar that smelled like old smoke and possibility, and she let herself remember being twenty. Let herself feel the weight of six years, of roads taken and not taken, of the women they'd been and the women they'd become.
Silas moved away to serve another customer, his slight limp barely noticeable. The old man beneath the photograph of the Berlin Wall finished his drink and left. The arguing couple fell silent, their hands finding each other across the table.
And Rory stayed exactly where she was, present in a way she was still learning how to be, carrying the past like a scar she'd finally stopped trying to hide.