Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXN9PD9SDQDAK3V5SM6R8B

The green neon sign buzzed and flickered against the wet pavement, throwing sickly light across puddles that hadn't been there an hour ago. Rory pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest with a bag of takeaway containers balanced on one forearm, the smell of Yu-Fei's garlic prawns cutting through the bar's permanent fog of old wood and spilled lager. "Last one," she called out, sliding the bag onto the counter. "Tell Silas his kung pao is getting cold." The bartender — a narrow-faced kid named Jamie who'd started three weeks ago and still couldn't pour a Guinness without panicking — jerked his chin toward the back. "He's in the office. Said not to bother him." Rory peeled off her rain jacket and draped it over a stool. The delivery shift was done. Her calves ached. She'd earned a drink and had nowhere else to be, which was either freedom or something sadder dressed up in the same clothes. She pulled a pint glass from the rack behind the bar — Jamie had given up protesting this weeks ago — and tilted it under the tap. The bar was half-full for a Wednesday. A couple argued in low voices near the jukebox. Two men in paint-spattered overalls nursed whiskeys at the far end. The old maps on the walls seemed to swallow what little light the pendant lamps offered, their faded coastlines and trade routes dissolving into brown stains at the edges. Rory had memorized most of them during slow nights. She could close her eyes and trace the shipping lanes across the Indian Ocean, the red pin-marks someone had pressed into the paper decades before she was born. She took her pint to a corner booth and sat with her back against the wall — a habit she'd picked up without noticing, one that Silas had pointed out to her once with a look she couldn't quite read. She pulled out her phone. Two missed calls from her mother. A text from Eva: *u alive?* She typed back a thumbs-up and set the phone face-down on the table. That was when she heard the laugh. Not loud. Not performative. A single note of genuine amusement, half-swallowed, coming from the bar. She knew that laugh the way she knew the crescent scar on her left wrist — by feel, without looking, the shape of it pressed into some deep layer of muscle memory. Rory looked up. The woman at the bar had her back turned. Auburn hair — no, darker, closer to chestnut now, cropped short where it used to fall past her shoulder blades. She wore a charcoal blazer that fit her like money, and she held her wine glass by the stem, which was new. The Niamh Sullivan that Rory had known in Cardiff drank cider from the can and thought wine was pretentious. But she tilted her head the same way when she laughed. That sideways drop, chin to left shoulder, like the joke had knocked her slightly off balance. Rory's stomach tightened. She sat very still. Niamh was talking to Jamie, who had apparently discovered how to smile. She said something Rory couldn't catch, and Jamie pointed at the chalkboard menu above the bottles, and Niamh shook her head, waving him off. Seven years. Rory counted them out like coins on a table. Seven years since the flat in Cathays, since the mildewed bathroom they'd shared with three other girls, since the night Niamh packed her bags and left for a consultancy job in Brussels without telling anyone until the taxi was already outside. She'd sent a text to the group chat. *Sorry for the Irish exit lol.* Eva had been furious. Rory had been something quieter than furious and much harder to name. She could leave. The door was right there. Her jacket was on the stool, but she could survive without it, buy another from the charity shop on Greek Street. She could finish her drink in the back room — she had the code for the bookshelf panel — and wait until Niamh settled her tab and walked back into whatever chrome-and-glass life had brought her to Soho on a Wednesday evening. Niamh turned on her stool to scan the room, and their eyes met. The recognition was instant. Not a slow dawning. Not a squint and a double-take. Niamh's face opened like a door flung wide, and then just as quickly something shuttered behind it — a flicker of calculation, of adjustment, that Rory had never seen before. The old Niamh didn't calculate. The old Niamh said whatever sat on her tongue and dealt with the consequences at speed. "Rory bloody Carter." She was already off the stool, wine glass in hand, crossing the room. Her shoes were heeled and clicked against the floorboards. Up close, the blazer was even more expensive than it had looked from a distance. Subtle stitching. No creases. Her face was thinner, the cheekbones more pronounced, and she wore makeup now — not much, but enough to notice. Foundation. Something on her lips. The freckles Rory remembered were gone, buried under powder or faded from years of indoor living. "Can I sit? God, can I sit? I can't believe—" "Sit down, Niamh." Niamh slid into the opposite side of the booth. She set her wine on the table with exaggerated care, as if it were evidence of something. "What are you doing in London?" "I live here." "Since when?" "About a year." "A year." Niamh repeated it like she was tasting it, testing the vintage. "And you never — I mean, I've been back from Brussels since January. I'm in Islington now." "I didn't know that." "No, I suppose you wouldn't." Silence. The jukebox changed tracks. Something with a harmonica. Niamh lifted her glass and took a measured sip. "You look good. You look exactly the same, actually, which is borderline offensive." "You don't." It came out harder than Rory intended. Or maybe exactly as hard as she intended. She watched the words land. Niamh's chin dipped. Not the laughing tilt. Something else. "I mean you look different. Not bad. Just — different." "Different covers a lot of ground." "The hair. The—" Rory gestured vaguely at the blazer, the shoes, the posture that was several degrees more upright than the girl who used to sit cross-legged on the kitchen counter eating cereal at midnight. Niamh touched her own collar. "Brussels changes a person. All those diplomats. You start dressing like them or they eat you alive." She smiled, but it didn't reach the right muscles. "You're doing — what, then? Lawyering? Your dad must have finally won that war." "I deliver food." "You deliver food." "For a Chinese restaurant. Golden Empress. Three streets from here." Niamh blinked. Not judgmentally — or if it was judgment, she'd gotten skilled enough to bury it beneath three or four layers of something warmer. "Okay. That's — is that temporary, or—" "Does it matter?" "I'm asking because I care, Rory." "You care now." The harmonica song ended. In the gap before the next track, Rory could hear the couple near the jukebox whispering, the scrape of a barstool, the rain picking up against the windows. She ran her thumb along the crescent scar on her left wrist. Old plastic. A broken toy she'd fought with until it bit her. She was six. The scar never faded. "That's fair," Niamh said. She set the wine glass down and folded her hands on the table. Her nails were painted a dark, professional burgundy. Not bitten to the quick anymore. "That's fair, and I know it is, and I've had a long time to know it. But you didn't exactly chase me either." "You didn't give me the chance." "I sent—" "A text to the group chat, yeah. *Sorry for the Irish exit.* We all got it. We all laughed. Eva threw her phone at the wall." Niamh's mouth twitched. "That sounds like Eva." "She was the only one honest enough to be angry." "And you?" Rory looked at her pint. The foam had thinned to a pale ring around the rim. "I wasn't angry." "What were you?" The question sat between them like something with weight. Rory thought about lying. She thought about one of those tight, clever deflections she was good at, the ones that made people laugh and moved the conversation sideways. Silas called it her barrister gene — the inherited ability to answer a question without answering it. "I was relieved," she said. Niamh went still. "Because you leaving meant I didn't have to figure out why I wanted you to stay. And I was twenty years old and I didn't have the vocabulary for that. So you left and I filed it away under 'things that happened' and I got on with failing Pre-Law and dating someone I shouldn't have and eventually running away to London, which I suppose makes me exactly as much of a coward as you were, just slower." The rain hit the window in a gust. The black-and-white photographs on the wall behind Niamh's head showed men in overcoats on bridges, blurred faces in crowd scenes. Someone else's history preserved under glass while hers sat across a table in a charcoal blazer, waiting. Niamh pressed her thumb to the base of her wine glass and rotated it in a slow circle. "I knew," she said. "That's why I left the way I did. Not because of Brussels. I mean, the job was real. But the reason I took it at three days' notice without telling anyone face to face — I knew what you were starting to figure out, and I wasn't brave enough to be there when you said it." "Were you scared of what I'd say, or scared you'd say it back?" Niamh's eyes were dark in the dim light. Darker than Rory remembered. She didn't answer immediately, and in the pause Rory saw the new version of her and the old version of her overlaid like a double exposure. The girl on the kitchen counter. The woman in the blazer. Both of them with the same fault line running through them, plastered over with different materials. "Both," Niamh said. "Equally. I know that's not satisfying." "It's honest." "First time for everything." Rory exhaled something that wasn't quite a laugh. She picked up her pint and drank. It had gone room temperature and slightly flat, and she drank it anyway because it gave her hands something to do. "So," Niamh said. "Delivery driver." "Delivery person." "Delivery person. And you live—" "Upstairs." Rory pointed at the ceiling. "The bloke who owns this place rents me the flat above it." Niamh looked around the bar as if seeing it for the first time. The maps. The photographs. The bookshelf against the far wall that was, if you knew where to push, not a bookshelf at all. She took it in with the eye of someone trained to assess rooms. "It suits you," she said, and it was the first thing she'd said that sounded entirely like the person Rory had known. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Sound like yourself. It makes this harder." Niamh's hands went still on the table. She looked at Rory with an expression that had no calculation in it, no layers, no Brussels polish. Just the raw, uncomfortable thing underneath. "I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm sorry I never called. I'm sorry the version of me you're looking at isn't the version you lost, and I'm sorry I can't undo the parts of the last seven years that made me into this." She gestured at herself — the blazer, the short hair, the painted nails. "I don't know if I like her either, most days." The door opened. A gust of wet air swept through the bar. Silas limped out from the back hallway, his silver signet ring catching the light as he reached for the takeaway bag on the counter. He glanced at Rory, then at Niamh, then back at Rory with an expression that communicated, in the economical way of someone who'd spent decades reading rooms for a living, that he understood something was happening and he would be elsewhere. He took the bag and limped back into the shadows without a word. Rory turned the pint glass in her hands. The scar on her wrist caught the neon glow filtering through the window, a pale half-moon against her skin. "I'm not the same person either," she said. "I don't know if you've noticed." "I noticed the second I saw you. You sit with your back to the wall now." Rory looked at her. Niamh looked back. "Tell me about the person you're not anymore," Niamh said. "And I'll tell you about mine. And maybe that's all tonight is. Two strangers comparing ghosts." Rory pushed her empty glass to the edge of the table and signaled Jamie for another round.