Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY1VYHVPSTTQG8XXTXMEQD

The Raven's Nest occupied that particular London corner where tourists never ventured and locals knew better than to ask questions. Rory had climbed the narrow stairs above the bar hundreds of times, her feet knowing the exact spots where the wood creaked, but tonight she'd descended for a different reason. Silas needed her to collect something from a contact, a favour that came without explanation, which had stopped surprising her months ago. The bar exhaled its usual mixture of stale whisky and furniture polish. Green neon bled through the front windows, casting the empty booths in acidic light. It was barely past eight, too early for the usual crowd, and Silas stood behind the mahogany counter polishing a glass with methodical precision. She was halfway across the room when the door swung open. The man who entered wore an expensive wool coat that hung from his shoulders like he'd forgotten how to fit inside his own clothes. His dark hair had receded significantly at the temples, and deep lines bracketed his mouth. It took her a full three seconds to place him, and when she did, the recognition hit hard enough to stop her breath. "Bloody hell. Rory?" James Hartwell. She hadn't thought about James in what felt like lifetimes. They'd met in first year at Cardiff, bonded over terrible hall accommodation and worse coffee, spent countless nights arguing about philosophy and politics and whether love was a biological construct or a social fiction. He'd been beautiful then in that careless way of twenty-year-olds who hadn't yet learned their own worth. Soft around the edges, perpetually smiling, prone to grand gestures and terrible jokes. This version looked like someone had extracted all the softness and replaced it with something harder. "James." She said his name like testing ice, uncertain if it would hold her weight. He crossed the distance between them with the careful movements of someone navigating unfamiliar terrain, and she saw it then—the way his left hand trembled slightly before he tucked it into his coat pocket. "I can't believe you're here. I mean, I can't believe I'm here, but you're here, which is..." He laughed, the sound brittle. "Has it really been seven years?" "Eight, nearly." His smile faltered. "Right. Eight." She gestured toward one of the booths near the window, and he followed. Silas watched from behind the bar with the particular attention of someone trained to read rooms, though he said nothing. He set down his glass and reached for another. James slid into the booth opposite her. Up close, she could see the details she'd missed—the silvering at his temples came from stress rather than age, the way his eyes had lost their particular brightness, the tremor in his fingers that returned the moment he stopped thinking about it. He ordered a gin and tonic without looking at the menu, and Rory got water. "You look exactly the same," he said, and it sounded like an accusation. "You don't." The words hung between them. He reached for the glass Silas brought, drained half of it immediately, and set it down with exaggerated care, as if it might shatter otherwise. "I got married," James said. "Did you know that? Not that you would. We weren't exactly keeping in touch." Rory remembered the last time they'd properly spoken—his graduation, when he'd kissed her forehead and promised they'd grab coffee soon, both of them knowing that soon meant never. "No. Congratulations?" "Don't." He held up the trembling hand. "Don't congratulate me. She left six months ago. Took the flat, the cat, most of the furniture. She was very thorough about it." He returned to his drink. Rory watched a man at the corner table deliberately not look their direction, though she could feel his attention like static. Silas' network, probably. The bar had ears. "What about you?" James asked. "Please tell me you're doing something extraordinary. Please tell me you escaped whatever conventional nightmare the rest of us stumbled into." She thought about the delivery shifts, the flat above this bar, the careful distance she'd maintained from her family since she'd left Cardiff. The fact that she now spent her days working for a retired intelligence officer in ways she'd never quite openly acknowledged. "I work in logistics." "You always were shit at lying." He laughed again, that brittle sound. "No, genuinely, that's worse than I expected. You were supposed to be the one who got out. You had this thing about you—this absolute refusal to accept the normal trajectory. You used to say you'd rather burn than dim." "I was twenty." "You were *right* at twenty." The words landed hard because he meant them. She saw the genuine sadness in his face, the recognition of something lost between his version of her and this version sitting across the table. "I went to law school," he continued. "Did the whole thing, the articles, got hired at a proper firm. Made good money. Wore the suits. Married a woman my parents approved of. Did exactly what was expected." He signalled for another drink. "And one day I woke up and realised I'd never actually chosen any of it. I'd just been following a script written by people who were already dead." Rory turned her water glass slowly between her palms. "So you left?" "Not voluntarily." He examined his hands like they belonged to someone else. "I had what my therapist calls a 'crisis event.' What I call the moment everything broke. Took too many pills, drank too much whisky, decided to become one of those clichéd warnings they give you about high-functioning people who aren't actually high-functioning." He looked at her directly. "I was in a hospital for three months." She didn't look away. She'd learned that skill at least—how to let people tell their truths without flinching. "When I got out, she was gone. The job had moved on without me. Everything I'd built was structurally unsound." He paused. "But I'm working on it. Going back to university, actually. Something I actually want to study this time. I'm forty-three years old and I'm doing first-year philosophy at the Open University like a proper disaster." "That doesn't sound like a disaster." "No?" He smiled, and it was closer to the real thing than before. "What does it sound like to you?" Rory considered him—this man who used to make her laugh until her ribs hurt, who'd promised her the world and meant it, who'd then disappeared into the machinery of conventional life and come out the other side broken. She thought about how they'd promised to stay in touch and how those promises had corroded in the silence. "It sounds like you're finally becoming the person you should have been." He stared at her for a long moment. His hand stopped trembling. "I didn't expect that from you. Kindness, I mean. Not after—" "After we didn't say goodbye properly?" He nodded slowly. Silas appeared at the edge of their table, not quite interrupting, but present. A reminder of constraints and boundaries, of the fact that Rory had places to be and purposes that didn't include reconciliation with ghosts. "We should exchange numbers," Rory said. It wasn't a promise and they both knew it. "Actually exchange them this time." James pulled out his phone with movements that suggested he half-expected it to combust in his hands. Their fingers brushed as she took it to enter her contact information.