Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY9DG6JK1F5DGQSZF18EG2

The green neon sign above The Raven's Nest flickered against the November drizzle. Rory pushed through the heavy oak door, water darkening the shoulders of her delivery jacket. She'd taken the back route from Golden Empress, cutting through the Soho streets to avoid the worst of the rain. The bar smelled as it always did—old wood, spirits, and something indefinably Silas. She peeled off her wet jacket and hung it on the stand near the entrance. The place was quiet for a Thursday, just a couple of suits nursing whiskeys in the corner booths. Silas stood behind the bar, his silver signet ring catching the light as he polished a glass. He looked up, registered her presence with a nod, and continued his work. Rory made her way to the bar, ready to head straight upstairs to her flat. That's when she saw him. He sat at the far end of the counter, shoulders hunched over a pint of bitter. His back was to her, but something in the set of his spine, the particular angle of his head—she knew that posture. She stopped moving. "Marcus?" The man turned. It was Marcus, but it wasn't. Gone was the careful grooming, the expensive casual wear that had cost more than Rory's monthly rent back when they were in university together. This Marcus wore a faded jumper with a frayed collar. His blonde hair, once meticulously styled, had darkened and grown out in an unkempt tangle. He had perhaps three days' worth of stubble, and his face carried a softness that hadn't been there before—not comfort, but a kind of dissolution. His eyes widened. For a moment, something flickered across his features. Recognition. Then something else. Shame, maybe. "Rory?" She remained standing, neither approaching nor retreating. Silas had stopped polishing his glass. She felt his attention settle on them both like a weight. "It's been what. Six years?" "Seven," Marcus said quietly. "Since graduation." He looked away first, back at his pint. Rory took the stool next to him, though she didn't sit. She stood with her hands on the bar, studying his profile. The Marcus she'd known at Cardiff had been annoyingly confident, the sort of person who asked for things with the certainty that the world would provide. She'd had a crush on him, which she'd never admitted to Eva, had kept locked away as a small, embarrassing thing. He'd been friends with a different crowd, the kind who talked loudly about internships at prestigious firms and where they'd travel for summer holidays. "What are you doing here?" she asked. "I live nearby. Clerkenwell." He lifted his glass, then set it down again without drinking. "I come in sometimes. Silas doesn't ask questions." There was a bitterness in that last sentence that didn't match the gentle tone. Rory glanced back at Silas, who had returned to his polishing with calculated indifference. "You're in London," Marcus continued, still not meeting her eyes. "You actually did it. Left Wales." "Ages ago." "Eva's here too?" "Hackney. We still see each other. She works in publishing." Marcus nodded slowly, as if she'd delivered bad news. He finally looked at her, and Rory saw something in his face that made her chest tighten. He looked exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with missing sleep. "You got out," he said. "Got out of what?" "All of it." He gestured vaguely, encompassing something larger than geography. "We had all these plans, remember? We were going to conquer everything. Become solicitors, barristers, partners at white-shoe firms by thirty. That was the entire script." Rory remembered. She also remembered leaving that script in pieces at the bottom of a drawer in her childhood bedroom, along with a Pre-Law textbook she'd never finished and a journal full of plans she'd abandoned. "I didn't conquer anything," she said. "Neither did I." Marcus picked at a mark on the bar's wooden surface. "I made it to junior associate at Linklaters. Six years. That was how long I lasted in the land of the living before I..." He trailed off. Didn't finish the sentence. "Before you what?" "Before I realized I'd made a terrible mistake." His fingers found the pint glass again. "I was good at it, you know. That's the thing. I was exactly what they wanted. Malleable. Hungry. I could work sixty-hour weeks and smile through client dinners and never once think about whether any of it meant anything. And it was working. I was on track. Making money. My father was proud." Rory had met Marcus's father once at a university function. The man had been all jaw and hard eyes. "So what happened?" "My mother got sick." Marcus's voice flattened. "Cancer. She asked me to come home, spend time with her. And I couldn't because I had a merger closing. Then she asked again for Christmas, and I said the same thing. Then it was urgent, and I drove down and she was already gone from the morphine, and I sat in her room and calculated the billable hours I could've been charging instead." The bar seemed to tilt slightly. Rory steadied herself against the counter. "I'm sorry." "After the funeral, I went back to the office. Back to the merger. And I realized I couldn't do it anymore. Not because of the hours or the pressure or any of that noble suffering you're supposed to complain about. I couldn't do it because I'd spent my entire life chasing something that wasn't real." He looked at Rory directly now, and his eyes were steady, almost clinical in their clarity. "You know what the worst part is? I had the chance to get out, and I didn't take it. Because I was scared. Because I'd already invested everything. And now I'm sitting in bars at three in the afternoon on Thursday, living in a one-bedroom flat, divorced because apparently my wife didn't sign up to be married to a ghost, and you know the really funny part?" "What?" "I still don't have any idea who I'm supposed to be without all of it." Silas appeared, sliding a fresh pint in front of Marcus without being asked. He didn't look at either of them. The gesture was precise, economical. Rory wondered what other conversations Silas had witnessed in this bar, how many people had sat at this counter and realized their lives had become stories they no longer recognized. "You're different too," Marcus said. "You look solid." "I deliver takeaway." "I know. I heard you were doing something like that. And I thought—" He stopped. "I thought you'd wasted your potential. That you'd given up. But you're not defeated the way I am. You just... are." Rory pressed her palms flat against the bar. The wood was cool and slightly sticky with years of spilled drinks. She thought about her flat upstairs, her small room with its single window overlooking Soho. She thought about the delivery route, the rhythm of it, the simplicity of taking packages from point A to point B with nobody expecting her to be anything other than exactly what she was. "I didn't give up," she said quietly. "I just stopped pretending I wanted what I was supposed to want." Marcus raised his glass. The movement was slow, almost ceremonial. "To wasting potential," he said. Rory didn't raise anything. She watched him drink, and then she turned and walked toward the stairs. Behind her, she heard Silas place another glass on the bar, and she didn't have to look back to know Marcus was still sitting there, still waiting for someone to tell him who he was supposed to become.