Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXDHWAZF0AJJV6VKKSQXTH

The green neon of the sign bled through the rain and laid a soft stain across the floorboards by the door. It caught the edges of old maps on the walls and the frames of black-and-white photographs that had yellowed like teeth. The Raven’s Nest hummed low with conversation. Ice ticked against glass. A taxi horn called from outside and died off. Rory shrugged off a damp delivery jacket stamped with a golden dragon and left it on a chair by the door. Her hair clung in dark ropes to her neck. She rubbed the crescent scar on her wrist like a worry stone, then slid onto her usual stool. Silas moved along the bar with a quiet sway, his limp gentle, not an apology, more like a rhythm he had settled into. His signet ring flashed each time he set a glass down. He gave her that small look that asked and also told. He placed a mug of strong tea by her elbow and poured a measure of something amber into a short glass and left that beside it without comment. His hazel eyes flicked past her shoulder, then back. A nod, not quite a warning, not quite a greeting sent through the air between them. She wrapped her fingers around the mug. The steam blurred everything for a moment. When it cleared, she caught a voice behind her, that particular tremor of Cardiff in it, like a ripple in a familiar pond. "Are you hiding in London now, Rory Carter?" Her name slid across the years and landed in her chest. She turned on the stool. The woman by the end of the bar leaned her elbows on the wood, sleeves pushed up, head bare. Carys had shaved her hair to a shadow, the big curls gone. Her face had sharpened at the edges. The thick eyeliner she’d painted on at sixteen had been retired. Clear eyes. A scar fanned pale from her left eyebrow to her hairline. A small silver coin turned over and over in her fingers, thumb making a groove with each pass. Rory held the mug with both hands and pretended the heat mattered. "You grew older without me." "You did it without me first." Silas busied himself with bottles behind them. He drifted away and let the two of them take the space he knew the way he knew when to cut a man off without offence. Rory got to her feet. The stool scraped. She crossed the few steps and stopped short of Carys, the old hug muscle twitching and then freezing. She didn’t reach for it. Neither did Carys. The coin clicked against a ring she wore that Rory didn’t recognise. "You're in Soho," Rory said. "You're at a bar." "It’s my bar. Sort of. Flat upstairs." "Couldn't be more you." "Couldn't be further from what you told me I’d be." "You’re not in court in a stiff wig, no." Rory glanced back at the maps, at the pinpricks and faded lines that had once traced trade routes and wars. "Silas lets me in after close. He owes me tea." Carys tilted her head, clocked Silas’s retreat, the way he moved like someone who had learned to count exits without counting. "He looks like a man who understands debts." "He runs this place." "Of course you’d find the man behind the curtain." "That's me." Carys touched the scratch on her eyebrow. "You look the same and you don't." "You shaved your head." "Chemo didn't make me. I did it myself. Control is a nice thing." "Looks good." "It feels like the wind owes me nothing now." "You’re not drinking." Carys waved the glass with a slice of lime sunk to the bottom. "Soda. More lime than soda, if I tell them right." "You never were good at halves." "Lies. You remember my mad maths skills." "You copied from me." "You let me." "I couldn’t stop you." "You didn’t try." Rory tasted the tea. It anchored her tongue to something at least. She caught Carys watching her wrist. Carys didn’t point, didn’t laugh, didn’t launch into the old story about the swing set and the badly timed jump. She took another sip of lime and pulled a face like she wanted to punish herself then and there for the memory. "You left," Carys said. "You stopped calling." "I rang." "My phone—" "I know about him, Rory." Rory put the mug down. The surface of the tea steadied. The word hung there between them without a name. It reached for the scar, for the black eye that hadn’t visited in two years, for the door she had slammed and then cried into. It touched all of that and more and then sat back down. "Carys," she said. "You left us with your ghost." "I left him." "He'd already done the leaving for you." "You didn't come." "I came to your door." "I was gone by then." "I came to the halls at uni. Your flatmate told me you'd moved out with him. She called him charming. She did that thing with her hand—" Carys traced a little flourish in the air with two fingers. "—as if charm mattered more than your voice." Rory watched the glass of soda sweat. It slicked Carys’s hand. The coin stuck to the moisture and then skidded off again and clicked against the bar. The sound poked at some buried corner of their sixth form common room, at the thud of lockers and the sweet stink of energy drinks, at the feeling that everything could be made and unmade in an afternoon. "I wanted to come back," Rory said. "You didn't." "No." "Years and years of no." "I didn't know how to explain not being myself." "You could have let me see it." "You were always good at walking in uninvited." "Still am. Ask my boss. He hates me." "You have a boss?" "Hospital. Nights. Portering. I shift bodies about and wheel machines that always hum like they know secrets. I make tea for people who've slept on plastic chairs for two days. I understand corridors." Rory lifted the amber glass. It burned kinder than it should. "You moved back home?" "I tried London for six months when we were twenty. Remember? You promised to come the summer after first year. You sent me a photo from the train station and then you didn't get on it." "I sat on a bench and watched pigeons fight over a chip." "You always picked birds with broken wings." "You always picked dogs that bit." "Only if they were the soft ones dying to be mean." They looked at each other and the old map of their friendship unfolded and it turned out their route had been longer than either of them remembered. It had taken them through cul-de-sacs and one-way streets and a lot of wrong turns. Neither of them reached for it to fix it. They just let it lie there between the coasters and the bowl of peanuts no one ever touched. Silas drifted back to refill someone’s gin and left a bottle within reach. He glanced at Rory, blinked slow, then at Carys, then back to the sink. His signet ring flashed again, a small lighthouse on a small coast. "You kept the accent," Carys said. "You lost yours." "Work beat it out of me. People pull faces if you bring valleys into wards." "They pull faces if you bring anything into any room." "You would know, Miss Pre-Law." "Don't start." "I won't. Your dad still wears the robes like a costume?" "He thrives in wig and gown." "And your mum still steals pens from school and swears she found them in her bag by accident?" "She teaches children to draw houses with windows. She calls me and forgets why she called." "She asks me about you in Tesco. She pretends she just bumped into me and didn't wait by the cereals." "She didn't tell me that." "She knows how you flinch." Rory breathed through her throat until it loosened. "What do you do when you’re not pushing ghosts down corridors?" "Sleep. Knit. My hands need to do something or I make lists in my head until they choke me." "You always needed to do something with your hands. You took up the snare drum for a week." "You told me I looked cool." "You did." "They told me I was too loud. I chose quieter disasters." Rory smiled without showing teeth. "You still laugh like you're breaking the rules." "You still make a small sound at the back of your throat when you think you're going to lie." "You memorised me." "I had to. You went missing." Across the room, a man squinted at an old photograph of a street market and told his date a story about his grandfather that contained too many heroes and not enough mistakes. The bar light caught dust in the air and turned it into weather. Carys blew out a breath. "I didn't come to start a war in your pub." "It's not a pub. It's a bar. Silas will lecture you on the distinction." "Let him try." "He's retired intelligence." "That explains the limp." "It explains the maps." "It suits you here, Rory. It fits the way your eyes always did three things at once. You can watch a door and tie a knot and remember someone's middle name while you make change." "I deliver for a takeaway, Carys." "You make it sound small." "It is. Small is safe." "Safe is a nice lie until it isn't." Rory swallowed. The whiskey set a small fire in her chest and left a warm ring that felt like armour. She raised the glass to Carys's soda, a quiet toast that neither of them named. Carys clinked, then stared at the lime as if it might answer something. "I got sober," Carys said. Rory looked at the coin, the numbers worn on one side. "I noticed." "It took too long." "You did it." "I broke things first." "You broke yourself?" "I broke you, too." Rory held still, like a deer in someone else's dream. "How?" "I laughed when you told me not to go with him that night. I told you we'd be grand. I told you I couldn’t leave my shoes there and come back for them later. He poured vodka like he was measuring love. I let him. You walked home alone." "I wanted you safe." "I wanted to be the most dangerous thing in the room." Carys’s mouth quirked like she hated the taste of that memory. "He cornered me by the kitchen door. He told me I looked like music. I pretended he meant something kind and then I spent a year making excuses for everyone I'd ever let too close. I learned how to drink so I wouldn’t remember who left first." "You never told me." "You never asked the right questions." "I didn't want to hear the answers." They left it there, the shape of it obvious and not to be shaped by language. The bar didn’t pause for them. A burst of laughter from a table by the window, the clink and hush of glasses, the soft murmur of someone ordering a Negroni like they knew how to order their life by cocktail. The world threaded itself around their silence and kept going. Carys flicked the coin and caught it on the back of her hand. "It's been three years today. Clean, I mean." Rory felt the skin between her ribs and lungs stretch and pull. She put her palm on the bar to keep her hand from doing something bigger. "You didn't call me." "I didn't know where you lived." "You always did before." "You lived in everyone else's flat. Your post went to the wrong doors." "You could've asked my mum." "She cried the last time I did. I haven't got a mop big enough for that." Silas slid two bowls of crisps along the bar. He didn’t look at them as he set them down within reach. He nodded once, the kind of thing that landed without ripples, then he went back to his end of the world, to the register and the orders that stacked like code. Rory pinched a crisp and snapped it. "Do you miss us?" "Who is us now?" "The girls who jumped off the pier into water so cold we couldn’t find our bones for an hour." "The girls who stole street signs and hung them in your room like trophies." "The girls who copied homework and swore we wouldn't ever turn in the same wrong answer." "I miss the way we were wrong together, yeah." "You could stay in London tonight," Rory said. "I have a day shift. Someone called in sick." "You could call in sick." "I did too much of that when I was actually dying." "Point." Carys looked past Rory to the door, to the rain that had eased into a fine mist that turned the street shiny. The green neon painted the pavement. Tourists shuffled under umbrellas. A boy in a hoodie ran by and cupped his hands around his cigarette like he had to protect the fire from something bigger. "Do you live with him?" Carys asked. "No." "On your own then?" "With other lives above and below me. I hear parties and washing machines. I meet takeout drivers at the door at odd hours. I pass Silas on the stairs when his knee does him in and he pretends it doesn't. It's company, in a way." "Do you sleep?" "I do now." "Do you pick locks for fun like you told me you would?" "No." "Liar." "I pick questions." "We always did love our puzzles." Rory pushed the glass away from her. "Do you blame me?" "For what, exactly?" "For not being smarter, sooner. For choosing wrong. For letting you walk home alone that night. For moving to London and disappearing and then only sending a postcard with a cartoon raven and no return address." "You didn't send that." "I thought about it, then I did it, then I didn't wait to see what it would do." "It sits on the pin-board in my kitchen. Right beside a bill I keep forgetting to pay." "You kept it?" "Of course. It had your anger on it. It smelt like the sea. I like things that don't behave." "You're different," Rory said. "So are you." "I don’t like the way that makes my mouth taste." "It tastes like grown-up." "I hate that word." "Me too. It sounds like something you have to apologise for." They both laughed, short and true. It cut through some of the static and left the air clearer. Rory reached across the gap and touched the coin in Carys's fingers with one fingertip. Carys stilled. The contact was barely there, a birds’ feet on a wire. "Come upstairs," Rory said. "I have a kettle and a window that looks at a brick wall and a plant that refuses to die. You can sit on my floor and tell me everything I missed in bullet points and lies." "You make it sound like amnesty." "I don't know what I make it sound like." "You make it sound like us." Silas looked up again, caught the small gesture of Rory pointing a thumb toward the stairs and the flash of Carys's ring as she stuffed the coin into her pocket. He drifted closer, like a tide remembering where to go. "Put it on my tab," Rory told him without looking. "It's covered," Silas answered from the air between them. Carys tapped the bar twice with her knuckles, an old habit, a private superstition that acknowledged and thanked and made sure the room didn't swallow her whole. She slid off the stool. Her shoes squeaked on the floorboards. Rory lifted her jacket and slung it over one shoulder. "You still take the stairs two at a time?" Carys asked. "Not when they creak." "Coward." "Pragmatist." Carys smiled and there, for a heartbeat, the girl with eyeliner and a borrowed snare drum stood where the woman with the coin had been. Rory caught it and tucked it somewhere beside her heart where she kept the things that kept her moving. Then she turned toward the back of the bar where the hallway cut off into the shadowed stairwell. The maps watched from the walls as they passed. The neon watered the doorway. The night threw its sound into the room and took nothing back.