Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXHMYJXFTFFR0S8V6D6MQ3

The green neon sign of The Raven's Nest hummed its familiar frequency as Rory pushed through the door, shoulders hunched against the October drizzle. She'd meant to slip upstairs to her flat without stopping, but Silas had texted about a delivery mix-up that needed sorting. The kitchen had packed someone else's order into her bag three streets back. The bar was quiet for a Friday evening. Only a handful of patrons scattered across mismatched tables, nursing their drinks like secrets. Rory made for the counter, already composing an apology for whatever administrative disaster awaited her, when she stopped. The woman at the bar held a gin and tonic at shoulder height, her forearm flexed with the casual confidence of someone who'd spent years at the gym. Her hair fell in fashionable waves past her collarbone—dyed a copper-auburn that caught the amber light. But it was the posture that caught Rory. Chin tilted up. Eyes scanning the room with the kind of assessment that didn't miss much. Recognition hit like a cold floor. "Christ. Is that Eleanor?" The woman's glass froze halfway to her lips. She turned, and for a moment her composure cracked—just a hairline fracture, but enough to let Rory see the surprise underneath. "Rory?" Eleanor Clarke set her drink down with deliberate precision. She slid from her barstool and stood, and the motion was all sleek assembly. Her clothes looked expensive in that understated way that suggested someone had advised her on them. Black wool trousers. A cream silk blouse with pearl buttons. Nothing like the thrifted band t-shirts and charity shop blazers Rory remembered from university. "I didn't expect—" Eleanor stopped, one hand extending halfway, then withdrawing. "It's been what, six years?" "Seven," Rory said. The number surprised her by sitting so precisely in her mouth. "Since graduation." They'd been inseparable once. The kind of friends who'd shared a cramped student house in Cathays, stayed up until four in the morning dissecting philosophy essays and terrible dating decisions, borrowed each other's clothes so often that ownership became theoretical. Eleanor had been wild then—sharp-tongued and reckless, the kind of person who'd convinced Rory to climb onto the university's glass roof just to see how Cardiff looked from up there. Eleanor's smile emerged cautiously, like she was testing whether Rory's face was trustworthy. "You're living here? In London?" "Upstairs. I rent a flat from Silas." "You work for a bar owner?" The phrasing landed strange. Rory pulled out the adjacent stool and settled onto it, creating a barrier of casual distance between them. "I do deliveries for the Golden Empress, a few streets over. Silas lets me rent cheap in exchange for the occasional favour." "That sounds very you," Eleanor said. Not unkindly, but there was something in it—a flatness, an assessment delivered from behind glass. "Always sorting yourself out in unconventional ways." "And you?" Rory gestured at her. "The corporate look suits you." Eleanor's laugh was short, brittle. She picked up her gin and tonic again, and Rory noticed her nails were done in a nude French manicure—the kind that cost forty quid at least. Eleanor's nails used to be bitten to the quick, decorated with chipped black varnish. "I'm in property development," Eleanor said. "London, mostly. Some overseas investment portfolios." "That's brilliant. That's really—" Rory paused. The words felt hollow in her mouth. "You always said you'd do something like that. Remember? When we were pissed on that cheap wine in the student kitchen, you said you'd buy up whole buildings and—" "I remember what I said," Eleanor cut in. She took a long sip of her drink. "I also remember what I meant to do and what actually had to happen." The subtext hung between them like cigarette smoke. Rory turned to signal Silas for a drink, catching his eye from where he stood at the far end of the bar. He read the situation with the efficiency of someone trained to read rooms, and brought her a bottle of Peroni without being asked. "So what's keeping you in London?" Eleanor asked. "I'd have thought you'd go home eventually. Back to Cardiff. I imagine your parents still expect it." The way Eleanor said it—measured and careful—suggested she'd asked about Rory at some point. Or at least, she was fishing for information to fill whatever gaps the years had carved into their shared history. "I'm not going back," Rory said. She twisted the bottle's cap and took a drink. "Left Cardiff for a reason." "Yes, I heard." Eleanor glanced away, and in that moment, Rory saw something flicker—discomfort, maybe, or guilt. "Your ex. The one you were with at graduation." The fact that Eleanor knew this information, knew it by name apparently, rankled in an unexpected way. She'd imagined their separation as clean, a simple fracture where they both moved away and forgot in parallel. But Eleanor hadn't forgotten. Eleanor had kept tabs. "How did you—" "I saw your mum at Tesco in Cardiff about three years ago," Eleanor said quickly. "We talked for ages. She mentioned everything. About Evan, about you leaving. She seemed worried." Rory's jaw tightened. The betrayal was strange—not Eleanor's fault, but tied up with her mother's tendency to broadcast personal disasters to anyone who'd once been invited to family dinners. "My mum tends to overshare," Rory said. "She was being a mum," Eleanor replied, and something in her voice shifted. It softened, just fractionally. "She still thinks the world of you, you know. Spoke about you like you'd hung the moon." The glass in Rory's hand suddenly felt very fragile. She set it down carefully. "What about you?" she asked. "You haven't been home much, I'd guess." Eleanor's expression closed like a door. She looked back at her gin and tonic, watching the ice cubes settle in the liquid. "My parents are disappointed in me," she said flatly. "Or rather, they were. They've moved past disappointment into something quieter. Resignation, maybe. I'm not the daughter they imagined anymore, and I think they've made peace with it. There's not much to go back to when you've already proved you're not the person they remember." Something in those words—the way Eleanor had arranged them, the rhythm of defeat underneath—made Rory understand that she was hearing something Eleanor didn't usually say aloud. The corporate shell could be stripped away sometimes, it seemed. "Is that what the property thing is?" Rory asked. "The thing they wanted?" "No," Eleanor said. "The thing I wanted. Or thought I wanted. It's complicated." She finally turned to face Rory fully, and her eyes—still that strange grey-green that could look almost silver in certain light—held something that looked like exhaustion. "You know how it was. The pressure. The expectations. My parents wanted me to be successful, stable, and I thought that meant property portfolios and wine tasting events and not calling my university friends because I was too busy building a life that looked good from the outside." Rory felt something sharp catch in her chest. "We were supposed to stay in touch." "I know." "You could have messaged. Called. Even once." "I know," Eleanor repeated, and this time her voice was smaller. "I was angry at myself, not at you. You stayed in the city we'd made plans for, and I just... left. Physically and every other way. And then enough time passed that reaching out felt like admitting how badly I'd handled the whole thing." Eleanor wrapped her hands around her glass. "So I didn't. I just let the silence happen. It was easier than explaining myself." Rory stared at her reflection in the dark glass beneath the bar's counter. The woman looking back at her looked tired. She'd been tired for a long time, she thought. Tired from the things she'd left behind, the things she'd chosen not to carry forward. "I'm angry too," Rory said quietly. "But not at you. I'm angry that we had something and we just... let it go." Eleanor's hand moved across the space between them, stopping short of touching Rory's wrist. It was the nearest thing to an embrace she could manage in a public bar on a Friday night, dressed in expensive clothes that didn't quite fit her anymore. "I don't know how to fix this," Eleanor said. "Neither do I," Rory admitted. The neon sign outside hummed its eternal frequency. Neither woman reached for her drink.