Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXXSQSESBG6J2BQXQKWYRR

The green neon of The Raven's Nest flickered twice before steadying, casting its sickly glow across the rain-slicked pavement. Rory pushed through the door, shaking droplets from her black hair, and the familiar smell of aged wood and whiskey wrapped around her like an old coat. Thursday nights were usually quiet—a handful of regulars nursing their drinks, Silas polishing glasses behind the bar with that distant look he got when he was remembering things he'd never talk about. She'd just finished a double shift at the Golden Empress, her calves aching from six flights of stairs to a flat in Brixton where no one had answered the door. The lo mein had gone cold in her thermal bag. Yu-Fei would dock her pay again. "Rough one?" Silas didn't look up from the glass in his hand. "The usual." Rory slid onto her regular stool at the far end of the bar, near the bookshelf that wasn't really a bookshelf. "Whatever's open and cheap." He poured her a measure of something amber without comment, his silver signet ring catching the low light as he set it before her. She wrapped her fingers around the glass, feeling the cool weight of it, and let her eyes drift across the old maps on the walls. Prague. Vienna. Istanbul. Places Silas had been, she suspected, though he'd never confirmed it. The door opened again. Cold air knifed through the warmth. Rory didn't turn—just watched in the mirror behind the bar as a woman stepped inside. Tall. Expensive coat, the kind with clean lines and invisible seams. Hair swept back in a way that looked effortless but probably cost more than Rory's monthly rent. The woman paused, adjusting to the dim lighting, and in that pause Rory's stomach dropped through the floor. The glass stopped halfway to her lips. Eighteen years. That's how long it had been since she'd last seen that face—rounder then, framed by braids, perpetually smudged with chalk dust from the nets behind St. David's Primary. Megan Price. Meg. The girl who'd taught her how to climb the old oak in Bute Park and kept her secret when Rory had kissed Tommy Morrison behind the cricket pavilion and cried about it afterward. Meg's eyes swept the room and landed on Rory like a physical weight. Neither of them moved. "Rory?" The name came out strange, wrapped in an accent that had shed most of its Cardiff edges. "Aurora Carter?" "Meg." Silas glanced between them, read something in the air, and limped to the far end of the bar where a man in a tweed jacket was attempting to get his attention. Meg approached slowly, each step measured, her heels clicking against the worn floorboards. Up close, the changes were starker. The softness around her jaw had sharpened into something architectural. Her eyes—the same warm brown Rory remembered—held a wariness that hadn't existed in the girl who used to share her lunch when Rory forgot hers. "I didn't know you were in London." Meg slid onto the stool beside her, leaving one empty seat between them like a buffer zone. "Five years now. Give or take." Rory took a drink, felt it burn. "You?" "Twelve. Moved after uni." Twelve years. Twelve years in the same city and they'd never once crossed paths. London was vast, but not that vast. Not if you were looking. "You look—" Meg started. "Different. Yeah. So do you." A pause stretched between them, filled with the ambient murmur of other conversations, the clink of glasses, the soft jazz Silas kept on low to fill the silences. "I go by Megan now," she said finally. "Professionally." "Professionally?" "I'm a solicitor. Whitmore & Associates. Corporate law." Rory almost laughed. Almost. She remembered Meg at fifteen, furious about the local council cutting funding to the youth center, organizing a petition that went nowhere but meant everything. "Corporate law." "It's not—" Meg stopped herself. Took a breath. "What about you?" "Delivery driver." Rory traced the rim of her glass with one finger. "Chinese food, mostly. Occasionally Thai if Mr. Huang's nephew is short-staffed." The silence that followed was different. Heavier. "I heard about your dad," Meg said quietly. "The disbarment. I wanted to reach out, but—" "But you didn't." Meg's jaw tightened. "No. I didn't." Rory let that sit. Let it fester for a moment before releasing it. What was the point of holding onto it now? Her father's spectacular fall from grace—the embezzlement, the trial, the way he'd looked at her across the courtroom when she'd testified against him—felt like something that had happened to someone else. A character in a story she'd read once. "How's your mum?" Meg asked, pivoting with the skill of someone trained to navigate uncomfortable conversations. "Still teaching. Year Four now. She pretends Cardiff doesn't remember." "People forget." "No. They don't." Rory finished her drink and set the glass down harder than necessary. "They just learn to pretend around you." Silas materialized with the bottle, refilled her glass without being asked, and disappeared again. The man knew when to be present and when to be furniture. It was, Rory suspected, why he'd survived whatever Prague had been. "I think about you sometimes," Meg said. The admission seemed to cost her something—her composure flickered, just for a moment, revealing something rawer beneath the polished surface. "About that summer. Before everything." The summer before their A-levels. Before Rory's father's firm started hemorrhaging money. Before Meg's parents announced their divorce. Before the world revealed itself to be the complicated, cruel, indifferent thing it was. They'd spent three weeks doing nothing of consequence—swimming in the bay, sharing earbuds on the train to Newport, talking about everything and nothing until the stars came out. "You never wrote back," Rory said. "After I moved to Bristol. Not once." "I know." "You said you would. You made me promise to write first, and I did, and then—nothing. Months of nothing." Meg's hands were folded on the bar top, her nails painted a tasteful nude. No rings. No jewelry except small diamond studs that caught the light when she turned her head. "I was ashamed," she said. "Of what?" "Everything. My parents splitting up. The way my mum talked about yours. The things people said about your family." Meg's voice dropped. "I was seventeen and a coward, and by the time I stopped being a coward, it felt too late to explain." Rory studied her reflection in the mirror—the dark circles under her eyes, the small crescent scar on her wrist visible where her sleeve had ridden up, the way she slouched like someone carrying weight that wasn't hers to bear. Then she looked at Meg's reflection beside her. Straight spine. Careful posture. The armor of someone who'd learned that vulnerability was a liability. "Is this the part where we catch up?" Rory asked. "Exchange numbers? Promise to grab coffee sometime and then never follow through?" "I'd like to follow through." "Would you?" Meg turned on her stool, facing Rory directly for the first time. "I'm here, aren't I? In this bar I've walked past a hundred times and never entered because it reminded me of the places we used to dream about finding. Hole-in-the-wall pubs with interesting people and stories in the walls." "Why tonight?" "Bad settlement conference. Needed a drink somewhere that wasn't pretending to be something it isn't." Meg's laugh was short, bitter. "All the wine bars near my office have exposed brick and craft cocktails and everyone's performing. I wanted wood and whiskey and strangers who don't care about billable hours." Rory gestured at the room around them. "Mission accomplished." "And then you were here." Meg shook her head slowly, as if she still couldn't quite process it. "After all this time. Like the universe decided to stop being subtle about something." "The universe doesn't give a shit about us, Meg. Megan. Whoever you are now." "Meg." The name came out soft. "I'm still Meg. Somewhere under all of this." She gestured at herself—the coat, the heels, the careful presentation—and for a moment Rory saw it. The girl beneath the woman. The braids beneath the sleek styling. The chalk dust beneath the manicured nails. "Why corporate law?" Rory asked. "Of all the things you could have done." "Money. Security. The opposite of everything my family had when it fell apart." Meg signaled to Silas, who poured her a whiskey without asking what she wanted. She seemed to accept this without surprise. "I told myself I'd do it for a few years. Build a cushion. Then pivot to something meaningful." "And?" "And then a few years became five, became ten, became a corner office and a pension plan and a flat in Kensington that feels like a hotel room." She drank. Winced at the burn. "I made partner last year. Youngest in the firm's history." "Congratulations." "It felt like nothing." Meg set the glass down and stared at it. "I celebrated with a seven-hundred-pound dinner, alone, reading briefs on my phone between courses. Went home. Cried in my bathroom for an hour. Got up the next morning and did it all again." The rawness of the admission hung between them. Rory felt something shift in her chest—not forgiveness exactly, but recognition. The understanding that damage took different forms. That Meg's pristine surface was its own kind of survival mechanism, no different from Rory's stubborn refusal to want things. "I live upstairs," Rory said. "From this bar, I mean. A flat that's probably the size of your bathroom. I make barely enough to cover rent, and most weeks I'm choosing between groceries and my phone bill." "Why?" "Because my ex put me in the hospital and my best friend from school knew a guy who knew a guy who had a room available. Because London was far enough from Wales that I could pretend to be someone who didn't come from the Carter family. Because I'm twenty-five and I have no idea what I'm doing with my life, and most days that terrifies me, but some days it feels like freedom." Meg absorbed this. "I didn't know. About the ex." "You wouldn't have. We weren't talking." Rory traced the scar on her wrist absently—not from Evan, from a childhood accident involving a broken window and poor judgment. But Meg's eyes followed the motion, making her own assumptions. "His name was Evan. It's over. Has been for two years." "I'm glad you got out." "So am I." They sat in silence for a while. Around them, the bar continued its quiet existence—Silas limping between tables, collecting empties; the man in tweed arguing softly with his phone; a couple in the corner sharing a bottle of wine and pretending the world beyond this room didn't exist. "I don't know how to do this," Meg admitted finally. "Reconnecting. Every time I think about reaching out to people from before, I freeze. Like they'll see through all of this—" she gestured at herself again "—and realize I'm exactly the same scared girl I always was." "Maybe that's not a bad thing." "Isn't it?" Rory considered the question. The scared girl she'd been—the one who'd let her father's expectations shape her choices, who'd stayed with Evan long past the point of sense because leaving felt like failure, who'd spent years running from a home that no longer existed—she wasn't proud of that girl. But she understood her. Had made a kind of peace with her. "I think we spend so much time trying to outrun who we were that we forget there was good there too," Rory said slowly. "You were brave once, Meg. Do you remember? When Katie Sullivan's brother was picking on the Year Sevens and no one would stand up to him?" "That was different." "How?" "I was twelve. I didn't know enough to be afraid." "Maybe that's what growing up is. Learning to be afraid. And maybe growing past that is learning to do it anyway." Meg stared at her—really stared, in a way she hadn't since they were teenagers sprawled on Rory's bedroom floor, talking about boys and futures and all the ways they'd never become their parents. "You sound like someone who's figured things out." Rory laughed. Sharp. Real. "I'm a delivery driver who argues with her landlord about hot water and hasn't called her mother in three weeks. I've figured out exactly nothing." "But you're honest about it." "It's the only currency I've got left." Meg finished her drink. Set the glass down with a decisive click. "Have dinner with me. Not tonight—I have briefs to review—but soon. This week." "Why?" "Because you're the first person in years who's looked at me like I'm a person instead of a position. Because I've spent twelve years climbing a ladder that's leaning against the wrong building and I'm too proud to admit I'm terrified of heights." Meg's voice cracked slightly. "Because I miss who I was when I was with you, and I'd like to see if any of her is still in there." Rory looked at her for a long moment. The expensive coat. The careful makeup. The eyes that were the same warm brown they'd always been, even if everything around them had changed. "Friday," she said. "There's a Thai place in Brixton. They know me because I deliver for their competition and they think that's hilarious." "Friday." Meg smiled—a real smile, not the practiced one Rory suspected she wore in boardrooms. "I'd like that." She stood, pulled a business card from somewhere inside her coat, and placed it on the bar beside Rory's glass. Heavy cardstock. Embossed lettering. Everything Rory's life wasn't. "In case you change your mind and need to cancel," Meg said. "Or in case you don't cancel and need the address." "There's no address on here." "I know. You'll have to text me for it." Something that might have been recognition—a version of the girl who'd orchestrated elaborate scavenger hunts through Bute Park—flickered between them. "Goodnight, Rory." "Goodnight, Meg." The door closed behind her. Cold air rushed in and dissipated. Silas appeared, collected the empty glasses, and left a fresh drink without being asked. Rory turned the business card over in her fingers. On the back, in handwriting she barely recognized, Meg had written: *I'm sorry it took me so long.* She slipped the card into her pocket and watched the door for a long time after it had stopped moving.