Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYD2D9CJYJAFWMHD3ZBYST

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bled through the rain-slicked window and pooled on the pavement like something spilled. Rory pushed through the door with her shoulder, one hand still gripping the straps of the delivery bag she hadn't bothered to drop upstairs. The dinner rush at the Golden Empress had run late, Yu-Fei cursing at a backed-up fryer while Rory pedaled through Soho traffic with two bags of char siu balanced on her handlebars. Her jacket was damp at the shoulders. Her fingers smelled of sesame oil. The bar sat quiet for a Thursday. A couple murmured in the corner booth beneath a framed photograph of some harbor Rory had never been able to identify. Silas stood behind the bar drying a glass with the unhurried rotation of a man who had nowhere pressing to be and hadn't in years. He glanced up when the door swung shut. "You look like a cat someone tried to drown." "Cheers, Si. Lovely to see you too." She dropped the bag on the nearest stool and peeled her jacket off. Silas set a whiskey in front of her without being asked, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the low amber light as he pushed the glass forward. Rory wrapped both hands around it but didn't drink. The warmth was enough. "Quiet night," she said. "It's the rain. Keeps the tourists in their hotels feeling sorry for themselves." Rory let her gaze wander across the old maps tacked to the walls, the yellowed edges curling like dried leaves. She'd memorized most of them in the year since she'd moved into the flat upstairs. The one nearest the door showed shipping routes through the Strait of Malacca. Another pinned behind the bar displayed pre-war Berlin in obsessive cartographic detail. She'd asked Silas about them once. He'd changed the subject with the fluid grace of a man who'd spent decades being debriefed. The door opened again. Rory didn't turn. She heard the footsteps—heavy, deliberate, the kind made by someone who'd learned to walk into rooms like they belonged there—and then the sharp intake of breath that wasn't hers. "Rory?" The voice landed in her chest before her brain caught up. She knew it the way she knew the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist: a thing so familiar it had become invisible until someone pointed at it. She turned on the stool. Niamh Gallagher stood just inside the doorway, rain beading on the shoulders of a charcoal coat that fit her like it had been cut specifically for her frame. Which, knowing the woman Niamh appeared to have become, it probably had. Her red hair, once a wild tangle she'd worn in scrunchies and elastic bands nicked from the postman, was now cropped close at the sides and swept back in a precise wave. Silver studs in both ears. A watch on her left wrist that caught the neon and threw it back in fragments. Rory's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "Jesus Christ. Niamh." "I thought that was you." Niamh took a step closer, then stopped, as if proximity required permission. Her eyes—the same sea-glass green Rory remembered—moved over Rory's face with the careful attention of someone cataloging damage. "I almost didn't—you cut your hair." "Two years ago." Rory touched the ends where they brushed her shoulders. "You look..." She trailed off because the word she wanted was *different*, and that felt like an accusation. Niamh filled the silence by pulling out the stool beside her and sitting down. She moved with an economy of motion Rory didn't recognize. The Niamh she'd known at Cardiff had been all angles and restlessness, knees bouncing under lecture desks, fingers drumming on table edges, a girl who couldn't sit still long enough to finish a cup of tea. This woman settled into the stool like a stone dropped into water. Silas appeared without fanfare. "What can I get you?" "Gin and tonic. Hendrick's, if you have it." He did. Rory watched him pour and watched Niamh watch him pour and felt the strange vertigo of two worlds colliding—the London life she'd built brick by careful brick, and the Cardiff life she'd fled. "How long has it been?" Niamh asked, though the tightness around her mouth suggested she already knew. "Four years. Give or take." "Four years and three months." Niamh accepted the drink from Silas with a nod. "Not that I counted." "You always counted everything. Used to drive Professor Hale spare." Something flickered across Niamh's face. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, maybe. The place where a smile would have been if things between them hadn't calcified into whatever this was—two women on barstools performing the archaeology of a friendship. "What are you doing in London?" Rory asked. "Consulting. Financial compliance, cross-border transactions. Boring stuff." "Since when do you do boring stuff?" "Since it started paying six figures." The number sat between them, not a boast but a fact stated with the same flatness Niamh might have used to report the weather. Rory thought of her delivery bag slumped on the stool beside her, the lingering smell of char siu, the flat upstairs with its radiator that clanked like a prisoner rattling chains. She took a sip of her whiskey. "Good for you, Niamh. Genuinely." "Don't do that." "Do what?" "That thing where you congratulate someone like you're conceding a debate." Rory set her glass down. The whiskey burned a line through her chest. Behind the bar, Silas had moved to the far end, ostensibly reorganizing bottles, though Rory noticed the slight angle of his head, the way his hands slowed when the conversation got interesting. Old habits. He couldn't help it. "I'm not conceding anything. I'm happy for you." "You're deflecting. You were always brilliant at that. Change the subject, make the other person talk about themselves, never answer the actual question." "You didn't ask me a question." Niamh wrapped her fingers around her glass. Her nails were clean, filed into neat ovals. The Niamh from Cardiff had bitten hers to the quick. "Fine. Here's one. Why did you disappear?" The word *disappear* landed like a stone in still water. Rory felt the ripples move through her. She traced the rim of her glass with one finger and stared at the map of Berlin behind the bar. "I didn't disappear. I moved." "You changed your number. Deleted your socials. Eva wouldn't tell me where you'd gone—just that you were safe. *Safe.* Like you'd been in witness protection." "Eva was doing what I asked her to do." "Right. And what about what I asked? I must have sent you thirty messages before the number went dead." "Thirty-two." Niamh's jaw tightened. "So you did count." Rory turned the glass in a slow circle. The amber liquid caught the dim light and held it. "I read them all, Niamh. Every one." "And?" "And I couldn't answer. Not then." "Because of Evan." The name landed between them like a dropped blade. Rory's fingers stilled on the glass. She didn't look up. She could feel Niamh watching her, could feel the weight of all the things Niamh had probably pieced together in the years since—the cancelled plans, the bruise on Rory's collarbone she'd blamed on a door frame, the way Rory had stopped coming to pub nights and then stopped answering texts and then stopped existing in any way that could be reached. "I'm not going to talk about Evan in a bar." "Fair enough." Niamh's voice softened by a degree. Just one. "But you could have told me. You could have told me and I would have—" "Would have what?" The question came out sharper than Rory intended. It hung in the air between them, vibrating with four years of silence and thirty-two unanswered messages and the particular cruelty of watching someone you loved narrow their life down to a single suffocating room. Niamh looked at her drink. "I would have come." "I know. That's why I couldn't tell you." The logic of that seemed to stall Niamh for a moment. She frowned, working through it, and Rory recognized the expression—the same one she'd worn in the Cardiff library hunched over tax codes, worrying a problem like a dog with a knot of rope. "You didn't want help." "I didn't want to be someone who needed it. There's a difference." "Is there?" Rory exhaled through her nose. At the end of the bar, Silas picked up a glass and began his unhurried rotation again, his hazel eyes fixed on the middle distance. His limp was barely perceptible as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other—a tell Rory had learned to read in the months since she'd moved in. When the limp worsened, the weather was turning or his mood was. Tonight it was steady. He was listening, but he wasn't worried. "You look good, Rory." Niamh said it quietly, like an offering laid at the foot of something she wasn't sure she could climb. "I mean it. You look... steady." "Steady's a new one. Usually I get *you look tired* or *have you eaten.*" "Have you eaten?" "I just spent six hours delivering other people's food, so no." A sound escaped Niamh—not quite a laugh, but close. The first fracture in the polished surface she'd walked in wearing. She pressed her fingers to her mouth as though to catch it. "God, you're still—" She stopped herself. "Still what?" "Still you. Under all of it. Still you." Rory looked at her then. Really looked. Past the tailored coat and the precise hair and the watch that cost more than three months' rent on the flat upstairs. Past the composure and the corporate polish and the new way Niamh held her shoulders, squared and braced, as if the world had taught her that softness was a liability. Underneath all of it, the green eyes hadn't changed. They still carried that particular intensity—the look Niamh had given her across a crowded lecture hall the first day of Michaelmas term, half curious and half decided, as though she'd already made up her mind about something Rory hadn't yet been asked. "You're still you too," Rory said. "You just cost more now." This time the laugh broke through. Full, startled, the kind of sound that turned heads. The couple in the corner booth glanced over. Silas raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Niamh pressed her palm flat on the bar, fingers spread. "I looked for you. After you left. I drove to your parents' place in Cardiff." "You didn't." "Your mum gave me tea and told me you were finding your feet. Your dad stood in the doorway the entire time looking at me like I was a hostile witness." "That's just his face." "I know. I remembered." Niamh's hand curled on the bar, then relaxed. "I just wanted to know you were alive, Rory. That's all. That was the bare minimum." The bare minimum. Rory turned the phrase over in her mind. She thought of the months after she'd left Evan—the blank stretch of days when alive was, in fact, the bare minimum and even that had felt like too much to manage. Eva's spare room in Hackney. The slow process of rebuilding a self out of wreckage. The job at the Golden Empress, Yu-Fei pressing containers of wonton soup into her hands at the end of every shift, saying nothing, requiring nothing. Silas offering the flat upstairs at a rent that was almost certainly below market, his only condition being that she not ask questions about the bookshelf in the back room. "I'm sorry," Rory said. Two words. They came out raw, unvarnished, stripped of the defensive wit she'd used as mortar between herself and everyone who'd ever gotten close enough to matter. She watched them land. Watched Niamh receive them. Niamh picked up her gin and tonic and took a long, measured sip. Set it down. Turned to face Rory fully, one elbow on the bar, her expression open in a way that looked like it cost her something. "Don't be sorry. Just don't do it again." "I can't promise that." "I know. I'm asking anyway." They sat with that for a moment—the impossible request and the honest refusal, balanced between them like a glass on the edge of a table. The rain picked up outside, drumming against the window. The green neon sign buzzed and flickered, casting its sickly glow across the wet pavement. Silas appeared between them, unhurried, and set down two fresh drinks. Whiskey for Rory. Gin and tonic for Niamh. Neither of them had asked. "On the house," he said, and moved away before either could respond. Niamh watched him go with narrowed eyes. "Who's that?" "My landlord." "Your landlord tends bar?" "He's a man of many talents." Niamh glanced around the Nest—at the old maps, the black-and-white photographs, the dim amber light that made everything look like a memory of itself. Her gaze lingered on the photograph above the corner booth, the one of the unidentified harbor. "Interesting place." "It grows on you." "Like mold." "Like home." Rory picked up the fresh whiskey. "If you squint." Niamh studied her for a long moment. Whatever she was looking for, she seemed to find some fraction of it, because the tension in her shoulders released by a degree. She lifted her glass. "To squinting, then." Rory touched her glass to Niamh's. The clink was small, almost inaudible beneath the rain and the low hum of the bar. But she felt it in her fingers, in the crescent scar on her wrist, in the place behind her ribs where she kept the things she'd been too afraid to carry and too stubborn to set down. They drank.