Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY68RJ7198XCCTAQJKP7BF

The green neon bled through the window, turning the rain on St. Anne's Court into liquid emerald. Rory traced the rim of her whisky glass, watching condensation bead and slide down the crystal. Three years since she'd fled Cardiff, and still the city lived in her shoulders—a tension she couldn't stretch out, a phantom barrister's wig itching her scalp. She'd changed from her delivery uniform upstairs in the flat, trading the polyester shirt for a wool jumper that smelled of basmati rice. The crescent scar on her left wrist peeked from her sleeve whenever she reached for her drink. Silas worked behind the bar, wiping a tumbler with methodical strokes. His grey-streaked auburn hair caught the low light, and his silver signet ring tapped against the glass—a metronome marking the evening's slow passage. He limped when he moved to replace the bottle, favouring the leg that had betrayed him in Prague. The door groaned against the November wind. Cold air cut through the cigarette smoke and warmth, carrying diesel fumes and the smell of rain-soaked wool. Rory looked up. A man stood on the threshold, water dripping from a coat too thin for the season. He scanned the room with desperate precision, past the black-and-white photographs of old Soho, past the maps curling on the walls, searching faces. His gaze locked on hers. She stopped breathing. "Aurora?" The voice cracked like old leather. "Aurora Carter?" Her fingers tightened around the glass. No one called her that. Not since she'd scrubbed the name from her bank statements, her CV, her existence. She was Rory now. Delivery person. Tenant above a bar. Ghost. He stepped closer. The overhead light revealed cheeks hollowed by more than time, a widow's peak that hadn't been there before, grey threading the temples though he couldn't be older than twenty-seven. His collar was frayed. A coffee stain marked his silk tie like a brown birthmark. "Marcus." She set the glass down. The crescent scar on her wrist itched—a phantom sensation from falling off a garden wall at seven, unrelated to the other marks she'd collected later. He laughed. The sound died in his throat. "You remember." "You look..." She stopped. He looked like a photograph left in the sun—faded, bleached of vitality. "Different." He slid onto the stool beside her, close enough she smelled the sour tang of drink on his breath, masking stale tobacco. "So do you. You cut your hair. It used to be longer." "Shoulder-length saves time." She touched the straight black ends. Practical. Efficient. Nothing like the elaborate styles she'd worn to impress Evan's parents. "Silas, whatever he's having." Silas looked up. His hazel eyes assessed Marcus with the quiet calculation of a man who'd once vetted assets in Eastern European safe houses. He poured a double whisky and slid it across the mahogany. The signet ring tapped twice against the glass—a signal, or merely habit. Marcus drank half in one swallow. His hands trembled, the tremor travelling up to his shoulders. "I looked for you," he said. "At the flat on Mutable Way. The landlord said you'd vanished. Left three months' rent unpaid." "I paid it." Rory stared at the mirror behind the bar, at her own bright blue eyes staring back. "Eventually." "You left term, Rory. Second year. Your father was..." He shook his head. The movement seemed to pain him. "Brendan wouldn't speak of it. Just said you'd taken 'employment.' As if you'd become a barrister's clerk or a secretary." The weight of that word. Employment. As if she'd descended into retail or typing pools, not fled a man who'd convinced her she was worthless, who'd held her wrist too tight during arguments—not the scarred one, the other one. "What happened to the law?" she asked, though she could see the answer in his stained tie, his shaking hands. "I finished." He stared into the amber liquid. "Took silk last year. Tenant at Carmichael Chambers." She blinked. Marcus—brilliant, chaotic Marcus who'd smoked roll-ups in the law library and argued tort reform with his shoelaces always untied—was a barrister now. A QC. Wearing a stained tie and nursing a tremor. "Congratulations," she said. "Don't." His grip whitened on the glass. "Evan told everyone you were unstable. Clinically depressed. That you'd sabotaged your own pupillage because you couldn't handle the pressure. The competition." Rory's spine straightened, vertebrae clicking into alignment. The old maps on the wall seemed to tilt, continents drifting apart. She felt the cool air from the door on her neck. "Did you believe him?" "At first." He finally turned to look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, the vessels ruptured red lines, but the sharp intelligence remained—dulled by alcohol or grief, submerged but not extinguished. "You were pulling away. Missing seminars. I thought... I thought maybe the pressure had cracked you. Like everyone predicted it would." "Because I was the girl. Because my father was Brendan Carter." "Because you were brilliant and they were waiting for you to fail." He finished the whisky. Silas stood at the end of the bar, listening without appearing to, his bad leg propped against the brass rail. "Then, last year. The Carmichael Christmas party. Evan came. He'd married that hygienist from Newport. He'd had too much champagne, got nostalgic." Marcus's voice dropped. The room seemed to contract around them. "He showed us photographs, Rory. On his phone. Called them his 'wild years.' His 'crazy ex.' You. Unconscious on a sofa. Bruises on your arms. A split lip." Her stomach folded in on itself. The scar on her wrist flared with remembered pain, though the crescent had nothing to do with Evan. He'd left marks that faded before Monday classes, internal damage that lingered longer. "You didn't know," she said. Not a question. "I should have." He laughed, a wet sound. "You flinched every time he walked into the seminar room. You stopped wearing short sleeves. I told myself it was stress. Winter pallor." Rory turned her wrist over, hiding the crescent against her thigh. The green neon buzzed outside, a constant insect hum. Three years of silence, of rebuilding, of learning the streets of London so she never had to remember Cardiff's courts. And now this—an ambush of truth in a Soho basement, served neat like the whisky. "I tried to call you," Marcus said. "After I saw the photos. After I understood. Your number was dead. Your emails bounced." "I changed everything." "He has a child now. A daughter. They named her Aurora." Marcus's head dropped. "I stood as godfather. Can you imagine? Holding their baby, toasting their future, while I remembered your face in those pictures? While I remembered watching him break you and polishing my own bloody briefs?" "You don't have to—" "Don't I?" He spun on the stool. The movement was jerky, uncoordinated, the motion of a marionette with cut strings. "You were the best of us, Aurora. The sharpest mind in that damn program. The fastest wit. And I watched you shrink, week by week, until you disappeared entirely. And I did nothing. I wrote my essays and I drank my sherry and I did nothing." The words hung between them, heavier than the humid air, denser than the smoke. Silas moved away, limping slightly, giving them the illusion of privacy though his reflection remained in the mirror—guardian of the back room where secrets were bartered, witness to this particular transaction of regret. Rory looked at her own reflection. A stranger with bright blue eyes and hair like ink, wearing a jumper with a curry stain from her shift at Golden Empress. She'd thought she looked like someone surviving. To Marcus, she must look like someone who had surrendered to gravity. "I'm alive," she said. "That took effort you're not seeing." "I can see it." He reached out, stopped himself before his fingers grazed her sleeve. "You're harder. Edges where there used to be... generosity. Openness." "Survival requires rigidity. You can't be soft in the delivery business." "Is that what this is?" He stood abruptly, swaying. The stool scraped against the floorboards. "You're running parcels for Yu-Fei Cheung while I stand in wigs arguing contract disputes? I'm dying, Rory. Liver failure. Six months, perhaps less. Drinking my way through briefs because I can't stand the resonance of my own voice in those empty halls. And I think—if I'd said something then, if I'd seen what was happening to you instead of seeing my own advancement, would I be this? Would you be... here?" He gestured at the maps, at the photographs, at the bar with its hidden room and its limping proprietor. The unspoken geometry of his accusation: she had fled downward, into the underworld of service entrances and back stairs, while he had climbed into a hell of his own architecture. Rory stood too. Her knee knocked the stool. The sound echoed. "You don't get to mourn me, Marcus. You don't get to use my ghost to forgive yourself for drinking yourself to death in chambers." "I only wanted—" "You wanted to save me then. You want to save me now. But I'm not the one who needs saving." She pulled her coat from the hook. The crescent scar flashed in the bar light as she thrust her arm through the sleeve, a pale sickle against her skin. Marcus slumped back onto the stool, his forehead resting against the rim of his empty glass. "Will you tell me where you went? What you did? How you became this person?" Rory paused at the door. The green neon painted her face in spectral light, turning her skin the colour of old jade. "I learned to carry weight," she said. "That's all." She pushed out into the rain. The door swung shut, cutting off the warmth, the maps, the weight of a friendship dissolved by time and silence. Behind her, the glass lay empty, the regret pooling with the dregs, while the rain washed the neon from her shoulders.