Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTXZ0ZTRNA400PAW0DZEDVS

The Raven's Nest sat half-empty on a Tuesday, which suited Rory fine. She perched on the second stool from the end of the bar—her stool, the one with the wobble that nobody else wanted—and peeled the label off a bottle of Czech lager while Silas wiped down glasses behind the counter. The green neon from the sign outside filtered through the front window and threw a sickly tint across the old maps on the walls, making the coastlines of forgotten empires look like something pulled from deep water. She hadn't intended to stay long. She'd come down from the flat to grab a bag of crisps and ended up nursing the lager because the alternative was going back upstairs to stare at the damp patch above her bed that was spreading in a shape she'd started to think looked like Wales. The door opened. Cold November air shouldered in and stirred the photographs on the nearest wall—their corners lifting, then settling. A woman stood in the doorway with a rolling suitcase and an expression that suggested she'd walked into the wrong place but wasn't entirely sure she wanted to leave the right one. Rory's fingers went still on the label. The woman was tall. Taller than Rory remembered, or maybe that was the boots—knee-high, leather, expensive. Her copper hair had been cut into something architectural, shaved close on one side and swept long on the other. She wore a camel-colored coat that fit like it had been made for her, and it probably had been, because the last time Rory saw Niamh Gallagher she'd been wearing her older brother's hand-me-down Carhartt and splitting a bag of chips on a bench outside Cardiff Central Library. That was six years ago. Maybe seven. Rory had stopped counting sometime around the third unanswered text. Niamh scanned the room. Her gaze passed over Rory, moved on, then snapped back like a compass needle finding north. Neither of them spoke for three full seconds. "Jesus Christ." Niamh let go of the suitcase handle. "Rory?" "Niamh." "Rory Carter. In a Soho bar." Niamh crossed the room in long strides, the suitcase abandoned by the door. She stopped a foot away, close enough that Rory could smell her perfume—something cedar and deliberate, nothing like the vanilla body spray from the Boots clearance shelf she used to drown herself in. "What are you—I thought you were still in Cardiff." "Haven't been in Cardiff for over a year." "Right." Niamh pulled out the stool beside her and sat. Her coat fell open to reveal a black silk blouse with a collar that could have cut glass. "Right. Nobody told me." "Nobody knew where to tell." That landed. Niamh's jaw worked sideways the way it always had when she was processing something she didn't want to process. She raised a hand toward Silas, who'd been watching the exchange with the practiced disinterest of a man who'd spent decades reading rooms. "Whatever she's having. And one for me." Silas set down his cloth, uncapped two lagers, and placed them on the bar without a word. He caught Rory's eye for half a beat—a question in it, or an offer—and she gave the faintest shake of her head. He moved to the far end of the counter and began reorganizing bottles that didn't need reorganizing. Niamh wrapped her hand around the bottle but didn't drink. Her nails were painted a shade of dark wine. Gel, not polish. The kind that required appointments. "You look different," Rory said. "So do you." "I look exactly the same." Niamh studied her. The black hair, the same since sixth form. The same faded Breton-stripe jumper. The small crescent scar on her left wrist, visible where her sleeve had ridden up. "Maybe that's what I mean." Rory took a drink. "What brings you to Soho?" "Meeting got pushed to tomorrow morning. Hotel's around the corner. I was walking past and saw the sign and thought—" She gestured at the room, its low light and old maps and the smell of wood polish and spilled beer. "Thought it looked like the kind of place where nobody would recognize me." "Bad luck." Niamh finally smiled. It was a different smile than Rory remembered. Controlled. Camera-ready. "No. Not bad luck." Silence settled between them, filled by the murmur of two men arguing about Arsenal at a corner table and the low hum of something acoustic coming through the speakers Silas kept mounted above the bar. "So a meeting," Rory said. "What do you do now?" "I'm a brand strategist. Consulting firm in Dublin. We do work for—it doesn't matter. Corporate stuff. Logos and narratives." Niamh turned the bottle in a slow circle. "What about you?" "I deliver Chinese food." Niamh blinked. "For a restaurant called the Golden Empress. Woman named Yu-Fei runs it. Best dan dan noodles in this postcode. Possibly any postcode." "You deliver food." "On a bicycle, mostly." "You had a training contract lined up. At—was it Eversheds?" "Didn't take it." "Your dad must have—" "My dad and I don't talk about it." Another landing. Niamh pressed her lips together and nodded, slowly, the way people nod when they're building a picture from pieces they know they're not entitled to ask for. "I left Cardiff because I needed to leave Cardiff," Rory said. She kept her voice even. This was a thing she'd gotten good at—stating facts without offering the seams around them, without letting anyone pull the thread that led to Evan and the year she'd spent unlearning the dimensions of a room she'd been afraid to cross. "Eva was here. She had a couch. The couch turned into a flat." She pointed at the ceiling. "Upstairs." Niamh looked up as if she could see through the plaster. "You live above this place?" "Silas—the man behind the bar—he owns the building. Rent's cheap because the hot water's unreliable and the walls are thin enough to hear the couple next door fighting about whose turn it is to buy milk." "Silas." Niamh glanced down the bar at him. He'd moved on to polishing his silver signet ring with the corner of the cloth, a habit Rory had seen a hundred times. "He looks like someone out of a le Carré novel." "You're not far off." "What does that mean?" "It means I pay my rent on time and don't ask questions." Niamh laughed—a real one, breaking through the varnish. For a flash, Rory saw her. The actual her. The girl who'd sat on Rory's bedroom floor at sixteen, eating Jaffa Cakes and reading out the most absurd personal ads from the back of the Western Mail in dramatic voices. The girl who'd held Rory's hand in the back of an ambulance when her mum had her first seizure, who'd driven her home after in a car she barely knew how to drive. Then Niamh straightened her shoulders and the moment closed like a window. "I looked for you," Niamh said. "When I came back from Berlin. That first year." "I know." "You didn't answer." "I know that too." "Can I ask why?" Rory turned the bottle. The label was gone now, stripped to pale adhesive residue. She pressed her thumb into it. "You went to Berlin to work for that design collective. You were building something. Every time you texted me, you were becoming someone, and every time I texted back I was sitting in Evan's flat trying to figure out how to—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "I didn't want to be the anchor. I didn't want to be the person you felt sorry for." "I wouldn't have—" "You would have. You would have come back." "And that would have been bad?" "For you? Yes." Niamh set her bottle down with a sharp click against the bar. "You don't get to decide that for me, Rory. You never did and you did it anyway. That was always your—" She caught herself. Drew a breath. The architectural hair fell across her cheek and she pushed it back with two fingers. "You always thought you knew what other people needed more than they did." "And you always needed to save things that didn't ask to be saved." The silence this time had teeth. The Arsenal argument had resolved or moved to another dimension. The acoustic song ended and another began, something with a banjo that had no business in a Soho bar. Silas, as if sensing the shift in atmospheric pressure, pulled a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and poured two measures into short glasses. He set them between the women without comment and limped back to his end of the bar, favoring his left leg more than usual—the cold always made it worse. Rory looked at the whiskey. Niamh looked at the whiskey. "I missed you," Niamh said. "That's all I came here to say, apparently, to a woman I didn't know was here. The universe has a stupid sense of humor." Rory picked up the glass. The whiskey was Jameson—Silas always knew. "I missed you too. Every day for about two years and then just on Thursdays." "Why Thursdays?" "We used to watch Bake Off on Thursdays." Niamh's mouth crumpled. Not a cry—she held it back—but the precursor, the tectonic shift before the surface breaks. She picked up her glass and clinked it against Rory's. The sound was small and clear in the quiet bar. They drank. "The hair's good, by the way," Rory said. "The whole—" She waved her hand in the general direction of Niamh's everything. "It suits you." "My therapist says I 'present as aspirational' now, which I think was a compliment." "You have a therapist." "Everyone in Dublin has a therapist. It's like having a dentist but more expensive and they never tell you to floss." Rory smiled. It broke across her face before she could shape it into something more guarded, and she saw Niamh register it—the old, unmanaged version of her, surfacing. "I should have answered your texts," Rory said. "Yes." "I was in a bad place and I handled it badly." "Yes." "Are you going to say anything other than yes?" Niamh looked at her. The bar light caught the shaved side of her head, the soft fuzz of regrowth there, and made it glow copper. "I'm going to say that I have a hotel room with a minibar and a meeting that doesn't start until nine, and that I think we have about six years of Bake Off to catch up on." Rory turned the whiskey glass in her fingers. The weight of it. The amber catching the green neon from the window. Silas had moved to the far side of the room, adjusting a photograph on the wall, giving them space with the precision of a man who understood exactly what conversations needed room to breathe. "I don't have a bicycle delivery until eleven tomorrow," Rory said. "Is that a yes?" Rory finished the whiskey and set the glass upside down on the bar, the way Silas always did when he was closing a tab. "It's a maybe that's leaning hard in one direction." Niamh stood, pulled her coat closed, and looked at Rory with an expression caught between the girl she'd been and the woman she'd made herself into—both of them visible at once, layered like a double exposure. "Get your coat, Carter." Rory slid off the wobbly stool.