Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY6PSV58Z2ZHPEN0NCR2YD

The Raven’s Nest smelled of old wood, spilled ale, and the faint, sweet ghost of cigar smoke from decades past. Aurora Carter wiped a damp cloth over the polished mahogany, her movements economical, her mind a thousand miles away from the green neon glow bleeding through the front window. Silas was in the back, inventory ledgers spread across his desk, the low murmur of a radio news broadcast a constant hum beneath the silence. The door creaked open, slicing a wedge of damp London evening into the dim interior. A man stepped in, shaking rain from a dark overcoat. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a weary set to his jaw that hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen him. He didn’t look at her, just headed for a stool at the far end of the bar, his eyes scanning the black-and-white photographs on the wall as if looking for a familiar face. Rory tossed the cloth under the counter. “What can I get you?” He turned, and the air left the room. Time did not slow down. It snapped taut, a wire pulled too tight. The years between them—five, maybe six—collapsed into a single, breathless moment. The boy she’d known was still there, in the faint freckles across his nose, the way his hair still fell across his forehead. But the man he’d become was a stranger, carved from something harder and infinitely more tired. “Evan,” she said. The name was ash in her mouth. His eyes, a warm brown she once knew better than her own, widened. A flicker of the old him—quick, bright, surprised—surfaced before it was submerged again by a guarded stillness. “Rory? My God. Aurora Carter.” He said her full name like he was testing the weight of it. She hadn’t been Aurora to him since they were teenagers. It had always been Rory. “I didn’t know you were in London.” His voice was deeper, rougher at the edges, like stones worn smooth by a relentless river. “I didn’t exactly send out announcements.” She kept her hands flat on the bar, her posture neutral. Cool. Collected. The persona was a shield, polished to a high sheen. “Whiskey? You always drank whiskey.” “Still do.” He slid onto the stool, draping his coat over the one beside him. A barrier. “Neat. Whatever’s good.” She turned, grateful for the excuse to break eye contact, and pulled a bottle of single malt from the shelf. Her fingers were steady as she poured two fingers into a heavy glass. The small crescent scar on her left wrist seemed to pulse under the dim light. She set the glass before him. He didn’t touch it. “You work here?” “Part-time. It pays the rent on the flat upstairs.” She leaned back, crossing her arms. “You look… different.” A dry, humorless sound escaped him. “You don’t.” He finally picked up the glass, swirling the amber liquid. “You look exactly the same. It’s… disconcerting.” “I doubt that.” “It’s true. It’s like walking into a museum and finding a painting you thought was lost.” He took a sip, his eyes never leaving her face. “Cardiff feels like a lifetime ago.” “It was,” she said. The words were clipped. “For me, anyway.” The silence that followed was thick, charged with everything they weren’t saying. The laughter in university libraries, the frantic plans sketched on napkins, the way his hand had felt in hers. And then, later, the suffocating silence of their flat, the careful way she’d started to move around him, the sharp, metallic taste of fear that had become as familiar as her own skin. “I heard you left Pre-Law,” he said, finally breaking the stare to look into his glass. “Your dad must have blown a gasket.” “He got over it.” “And you wound up here. Serving drinks.” “Among other things.” She picked up a clean glass and began polishing it with a fresh cloth, needing something to do with her hands. “What about you? Last I heard, you were headed for a bright future in finance. Suits. Meetings. A corner office with a view.” He barked a short, sharp laugh that held no joy. “That was the plan.” “What happened?” He finished the whiskey in one long swallow, pushing the empty glass toward her. “Life. It has a way of… rerouting you.” She didn’t pour him another. She just waited. “I left Cardiff about a year after you did,” he said, his voice low, almost confessional. “Couldn’t stand it. Every pub, every street corner… it was all just a monument to my own spectacular failure. I came here, got a job pushing paper for a logistics firm. It’s dull. It pays the bills.” He finally met her gaze again, and the raw honesty in it was a shock. “I think about it a lot, you know. How it ended. What I became.” Rory’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. This was not the script she had rehearsed in her head for years. This was not the defiant, unrepentant man she had expected. This was a ghost, haunted by his own reflection. “You weren’t yourself,” she said carefully, the words chosen like stepping stones across a treacherous river. “I was,” he corrected, his voice firm. “That’s the worst part. That was me. The stress, the pressure from my family, the fear of not being good enough… it curdled something in me. I took it out on you. I was cruel. I was… I was a monster, Rory.” He looked down at his hands, at the broad, capable fingers that had once clenched into fists in anger. “I’m not making excuses. There aren’t any. I’m just stating a fact. I am deeply, profoundly sorry for the things I said. The things I did. For the person I made you afraid of.” The admission hung in the air between them, vast and heavy. The unspoken regret was a physical presence, a third person sitting at the bar. She could have said it was okay. She could have offered the cheap absolution people offer to ease their own discomfort. But it wouldn’t have been true, and he would have known it. “I don’t think about Cardiff,” she lied. “I built a new life.” He nodded slowly, accepting the deflection for what it was. A boundary. “Good. I’m glad.” He gestured to the bottle. “Another?” She poured, her movements slower this time. The glint of Silas’s silver signet ring flashed from the back room doorway as he shifted his weight, a silent sentinel ensuring the scene didn’t turn. He knew. Of course he knew. Eva would have told him everything. Evan took the fresh drink. “You were always the smart one. The strong one. You got out.” “I had help.” “From that friend of yours? Eva?” “Among others.” She didn’t elaborate. The network of people who had helped her vanish—Eva’s fierce loyalty, Silas’s quiet offer of a job and a safe place to live—was not his business. It was the architecture of her survival, and he had no blueprints. He drank again, and the silence returned, less tense now, but sadder. The weight of their shared history, of the divergent paths they’d taken, settled over them. He was a relic from a past life, a chapter she had thought firmly closed. But chapters have a way of bleeding into one another. “I should go,” he said suddenly, placing a twenty-pound note on the bar. It was too much for two drinks. “Let you get on with your evening.” He stood, pulling on his overcoat. He moved with a new deliberateness, as if every action required conscious thought. “Evan.” The name felt foreign on her tongue. He paused, his hand on the door. “The person you were… he’s not here anymore. Is he?” He turned, and for a fleeting second, she saw the boy he’d been—vulnerable, uncertain, desperately wanting to be good. “I work very hard every day to make sure he isn’t.” Then he was gone, the door sighing shut behind him, leaving only the echo of his words and the scent of rain on the air. Rory stood motionless behind the bar, the twenty-pound note staring up at her from the polished wood. She picked it up, her fingers tracing the crisp edge. It felt like both an apology and a farewell. She folded it once, twice, and tucked it into the tip jar, burying it out of sight. Some ghosts, she decided, were better left in the past.