Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY4XBJ58YRJG05WZ8VSYC0

The green neon sign buzzed and flickered against the wet pavement, casting a sickly glow over the puddles that had collected in the cracked concrete. Inside The Raven's Nest, the air hung thick with the smell of old wood and spilled lager, and the black-and-white photographs on the walls seemed to watch the room with the patience of the dead. Rory balanced three plates of fish and chips along her left arm and a pint of bitter in her right hand, weaving between tables with the practiced economy of someone who'd learned that tips lived in speed and silence. The dinner crowd was thin for a Thursday—just the usual collection of Soho drifters and a table of tourists who'd wandered in expecting something more photogenic. She set the plates down, slid the pint across to a man in a rumpled corduroy jacket, and turned back toward the bar. She almost didn't see him. He sat in the far corner beneath a faded map of the Ottoman Empire, hunched over a glass of something amber, his coat still on as if he hadn't decided whether to stay. His hair had gone thin on top, and the jawline she remembered—sharp, almost aggressive in its angles—had softened under a layer of weight that sat unevenly on his frame. But the hands gave him away. Long fingers wrapped around the glass the way they used to wrap around a pen during lecture, the left thumb tapping a restless rhythm against the side. Marcus Hale. The name surfaced like a stone pulled from deep water, dragging silt with it. Marcus, who'd sat next to her for two years in Griffith's Constitutional Law seminar. Marcus, who could recite entire passages of Denning's judgments from memory and make them sound like poetry. Marcus, who'd driven her to the hospital the night Evan shoved her into the kitchen counter, and who she'd never called back after she left Cardiff. She stood in the middle of the room with an empty tray pressed against her hip, watching him for three full seconds before he looked up. His eyes found hers. The recognition came slow, filtering through whatever fog he'd been sitting in, and then his face opened in a way that made her chest hurt. "Rory?" She crossed the room. Up close, the changes were harder to catalog and easier to feel. His skin had a grayish quality under the dim light, and the collar of his shirt was frayed where it met his coat. But his eyes—brown, almost black—still held that same restless intelligence, the look of a mind that never quite stopped working even when its owner wished it would. "Marcus bloody Hale." "Sit down." He pulled the chair out with his foot. "Unless you're—I mean, do you work here?" "I help out sometimes. Silas—the owner—he's my landlord. I live upstairs." She sat. She hadn't meant to sit. Thursday nights she was supposed to restock the bar before the weekend rush, and Silas would be limping out of the back room any minute to remind her. But she sat. Marcus stared at her like she was a problem he'd been set and couldn't solve. "You're in London." "Three years now." "Three years." He repeated it the way people repeat numbers that don't add up. "I looked for you, after. Your mum said you'd gone to stay with a friend, but she wouldn't say where. I thought maybe Dublin, your dad's family—" "My mum was protecting me." Something passed across his face. He nodded, slow, and took a drink. "From Evan." The name landed between them on the scarred table like a coin neither wanted to pick up. "From everything," Rory said. "Cardiff was—I needed it to not exist for a while. All of it." "Including me." It wasn't a question. She let the silence answer it anyway, running her thumb along the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. An old habit. The scar was from when she was seven and had fallen through a greenhouse window, nothing to do with any of it, but her fingers found it whenever conversations turned to the geography of damage. "You look different," she said. He laughed. A short, dry sound, like tearing paper. "I look like shit, Rory. You can say it." "I wasn't going to say that." "You were thinking it. You always had that face—the one where your mouth is being diplomatic and your eyes are writing a verdict." She almost smiled. "Alright. You look tired." "Tired." He turned the glass in his hands. "That's generous. I'll take it." Behind the bar, Silas had emerged from somewhere in the back, his silver signet ring catching the light as he wiped down the counter. He glanced at Rory, at the empty tray still propped against the table leg, at the stranger across from her. His eyebrows performed a minimal interrogation. She gave him a look that said later. "So what happened?" she asked. "Last I heard, you'd made pupillage at Three Temple. Everyone said you'd take silk before forty." Marcus set his glass down with too much care, the way people handle things when they're afraid of breaking them. "Everyone said a lot of things." "Marcus." "I got through pupillage. Did tenancy for two years. Immigration law, asylum cases mostly. The stuff nobody else wanted." He paused. "You remember how I was about things. If something was broken, I had to fix it. Couldn't walk past it." "I remember you once spent four hours arguing with Professor Griffith about a footnote in a case that wasn't even on the syllabus." "Right. That energy. Imagine pointing it at the entire British immigration system." He drained his glass and set it down and looked at it as though another drink might appear through sheer will. "I burned out, Rory. Properly. Not the kind where you take a holiday and come back refreshed. The kind where you stop sleeping and then you stop eating and then one morning you're standing on Waterloo Bridge at five AM and you can't remember driving there." The noise of the bar—the clatter of glasses, the low murmur of conversation, the occasional bark of laughter from the tourists—seemed to recede. The map of the Ottoman Empire hung above Marcus like an artifact from a world that no longer existed, its borders drawn by people who'd believed their lines would hold. "When was this?" Rory's voice came out quieter than she intended. "Eighteen months ago. Give or take. I moved back in with my parents for a while, which was its own particular circle of hell. My mother kept making soup and leaving it outside my door like I was a medieval plague victim." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Then I did some time in a residential program. Therapeutic community, they called it. Twelve weeks in Hertfordshire learning to breathe and make ceramic bowls." "Are you still—" "I'm on medication. I see someone twice a month. I'm, according to the professionals, managing." He said the word like it tasted of cardboard. "I came to London today for a job interview. Data entry for a housing association in Lambeth." The distance between immigration barrister and data entry clerk opened up in the air between them, and Rory felt its dimensions without needing to measure them. She knew something about the space between what you were supposed to become and what you actually became. She'd mapped that territory herself, navigating it on a delivery scooter through streets she'd never planned to know. "Did you get it?" "Don't know yet. The woman who interviewed me kept looking at my CV like it was written in a language she only half spoke. Two years at the bar and then this great blank space, and now I'm applying to input council tax records." He picked at the frayed collar of his shirt. "She asked about the gap. I told her I'd been traveling. Which isn't technically a lie. I did travel. Inward. Extensively." Rory flagged down Silas with a tilt of her head. The older man limped over, his hazel eyes moving between them with the quiet assessment of someone who'd spent decades reading rooms for threats. "Two whiskeys, Si. The Jameson, not the house." Silas nodded and moved away without comment, though his gaze lingered on Marcus for a half-second longer than necessary. "Irish whiskey," Marcus said. "Your dad's influence." "Some things stick." "Some things." He looked at her—really looked, the way he used to when they'd sit in the university library after hours, trading case notes and the kind of confessions that only came out under fluorescent light. "Why didn't you call me back, Rory? After you left. I wasn't asking to track you down. I just wanted to know you were alive." The words carried no accusation. That was what made them worse. If he'd been angry, she could have met anger with explanation, could have built a defense out of circumstance and necessity. But he sat there with his soft, ruined face and his honest question, and she had nothing to offer except the truth, which was ugly and insufficient. "Because you drove me to A&E. Because you saw me with blood on my mouth and my wrist swelling up and you didn't say anything, you just drove, and that was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in two years. And I couldn't carry the weight of someone who'd seen me like that. Not while I was trying to build something that didn't have Evan's fingerprints on it." She traced the scar on her wrist again. Not the one from Evan. The one from before. The one that belonged only to her. "I cut everyone out. Eva's the only one I kept, because Eva didn't see the worst of it. She just got the after." Marcus was quiet for a long time. Silas returned with two glasses and set them down with the careful economy of a man who understood that some tables carried weight beyond their physical capacity. He retreated to the bar. "I spent a long time being angry about it," Marcus said. "Then I spent a longer time understanding it. And then I came apart, and I understood it even better, because I did the same thing. Everyone who'd known me as the brilliant one, the one who was going somewhere—I couldn't look at them. My own reflection was bad enough." He picked up the whiskey and held it up to the light. The amber caught the glow from the old wall lamps, warm against the cold map behind him. "We're a pair, aren't we." Rory picked up her glass. She didn't clink it against his. That would have been a gesture from some other version of this reunion, some brighter timeline where they were catching up over drinks and swapping stories about careers that had gone according to plan. She just drank. He drank. The whiskey burned in the good way, the way that reminded you your throat was still there, that you could still swallow. "I deliver Chinese food on a scooter," she said. "For a woman named Yu-Fei who calls me Laila because she misheard my name on my first day and I never corrected her. I live above this bar. I own approximately four things of value, one of which is a kettle." Marcus let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Pre-Law Rory. Brendan Carter's daughter. The one he used to parade at Law Society dinners." "She's dead. I buried her somewhere on the M4." "Immigration Barrister Marcus. The one his mother told all her friends about at church." "Left him on Waterloo Bridge." They sat with that. The bar filled incrementally around them—a couple claiming the table near the window, a solitary man in a flat cap settling onto a stool. The tourists had gone, leaving their table littered with napkins. The photographs on the walls watched it all with their monochrome patience. "I should have called," Rory said. "Not for you. For me. I told myself it was about protecting my new start, but some of it was just cowardice. Plain and simple." "And some of it was survival. Those two things look identical from the inside." She met his eyes. The restless intelligence was still there, but it shared space now with something slower. Weariness, yes, but also a quality she could only describe as porousness—as if whatever walls he'd once built around himself had been dissolved by chemicals, or therapy, or just the relentless grinding of years against expectation. "Are you heading back tonight?" she asked. "Last train's at eleven something. I should probably—" "Stay for another drink." He looked at her. She looked at him. Between them, three years of silence and eighteen months of breakdown and the ghost of a late-night drive to a hospital where neither of them had spoken a word, because there'd been nothing to say that the blood hadn't already said. "Alright," Marcus said, and wrapped his long fingers around the glass as if it were something worth holding onto.