Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYDCD5BJBVDGNAB14E9YFN

Silas worked a wedge of lime around the rim of a glass, his signet ring catching the green neon that bled through the windows. The maps on the wall held the dim like old secrets. Someone laughed at the back table, that kind of laugh that rose and then broke, and the jukebox dragged a dusty bassline over the floorboards. I came down the steps from the flat with my hands in my jacket. My wrist brushed the banister and I felt the small crescent ridge under my thumb without looking. The room smelled of citrus and old oak. Silas glanced up as I reached the bar. “Carter, you hungry or just trouble?” “Just thirsty. Ginger beer if you’ve got it cold.” He slid the bottle across and watched the curtain of vapour curl when I cracked it. His limp showed when he shifted to catch a pair of empty tumblers, then vanished again behind that smooth way he moved where you’d swear he never missed a step. He never asked with words, only with the weight of his eyes. I tipped the bottle and let the burn sit. “Quiet for a Friday,” I said. “You’re early for a Friday.” He drifted down to the other end, stapled a smile to a couple in for first dates and cheap wine, and left me with the maps and the colour bleeding out of the neon sign. There was a man two stools away with his coat folded on his lap, nursing a glass of something clear. He had the posture of someone used to being watched, shoulders set, hands patient on the damp coaster. When he turned to look at the door, I caught his profile. It hit in pieces. The line of the jaw first, then the scar above his eyebrow from the night with the shopping trolley, then the ridge of his ear where he used to keep a safety pin. Time had worked him over. The safety pin was gone. His hair had gone short and sensible, with grey flickers at the temple. His shirt collar was black and there was white at the throat. “Rory?” The word went strange in my ear. He’d kept the lift at the end, the valley in it. I held his gaze and tried to pull the years into something one word could hold. “Dylan Price,” I said. “You look like you got house-trained.” He smiled without teeth and touched the white at his throat. “You should see my parishioners.” “You’re a priest.” “Vicar.” He tilted the glass. “Lime and soda. Wild, I know.” I let a breath out I didn’t know I held, and that annoyed me, so I took the stool beside him and hooked a boot on the rung. “Last time I saw you, you had hair to your shoulders and you were arguing that anarchism was the only moral framework.” “I still think that. I just pray about it first.” He watched my face like you watch a window on a train to catch your own reflection. “Your hair’s shorter,” he said. “It’s always been this way.” “We dyed it seaweed green in second year.” “That was a bet.” “You won. I remember the sink.” I pictured the Cathays kitchen, the dye packet bleeding into the cheap enamel, the fumes of vodka and instant noodles. I tasted cheap salt in my mouth and heard a kettle click off somewhere in my head. He leaned in a little. “You’ve not been back,” he said. “To Cardiff?” “To your old street. Your mam asked me last time I saw her at Tesco whether I’d heard from you. I told her no and she nodded like she’d expected that.” “You saw my mother in Tesco.” “She was buying leeks. Of course she was.” “How is she?” “She’s still got the laugh that makes strangers join in.” “And my father?” He ran his thumb along the edge of his glass. “Still working lists in his head when he walks.” He swallowed. “He asked after you by not asking.” The maps on the wall weren’t maps of places I knew, but the place where the Bristol Channel rolls back and exposes green-black rock lived under my skin. I lifted the ginger beer and let the sweetness bite. “Silas,” Dylan said, half turning, “this is the bit where you slide over and distract us both.” Silas raised an eyebrow and dried a wineglass with a bar towel that had seen better decades. “Refills I can offer. Blessings I leave to professionals.” “I don’t bless bars.” “Then you’re in the wrong parish.” Dylan’s eyes creased. “He always like this?” “Like what?” Silas said. “Knowing the thing you’re not saying.” Silas tapped a finger against his ring and moved away to the couple, his limp showing for a heartbeat when he pivoted. “You came to London and vanished,” Dylan went on. “People thought you’d gone on a gap year to somewhere that didn’t need maps.” “I moved a mile. The tube counts.” “Eva told me you were safe. Then her number changed.” “You called her?” “Of course I called her.” He looked at my wrist and then looked away, polite like he hadn’t seen me touch the scar. “I knocked on your door once. In Cardiff. He answered.” The jukebox clicked and slid into a new groove, drums that sounded like shoes on wet pavements. “You walked away,” I said. “I walked to the end of your path and forgot how to turn back.” “You could have said my name louder.” “You would have heard it like an insult.” “You didn’t know that.” “I did. I knew it in the way you only know the things you never say when you should.” He lifted the lime and soda and watched the lime wedge bump against the ice. His knuckles had a new scar too, white on the brown. I remembered those hands on guitar strings in living rooms, on handlebars, waving in court demonstrations we went to for their sandwiches and their righteous chants. He had become the kind of person who wore a collar and took his hands from his pockets when he spoke to people. “Why the collar?” I asked. “Rhys.” He didn’t offer the rest. He didn’t have to. I pictured his brother upside down in a ditch off the A48, or asleep at a party he never woke from. Rhys with a grin wide as the Taff. Rhys who chased us out of his room with a slipper and then shared his crisps when he cooled. I pressed my thumb into the ridge of my scar. “You weren’t there,” I said. “I was drunk and late and then I wasn’t anything for a while. After that I kept very still. Then I moved again and I moved towards this.” He put a hand flat on his chest like he tested whether his heart still kept a beat. The collar sat neat and white. The old silver ring he used to wear as a joke was gone. A thin band glinted on his left hand. “You got married,” I said. “I did. Two years now.” “You look… softer isn’t the word.” “Don’t try and compliment me. Your face doesn’t know how.” “I’m happy for you.” “It doesn’t reach your eyes.” “Your collar doesn’t reach your jokes.” He breathed out through his nose and then the breath became a sound that nearly was a laugh. He pulled a phone and glanced at it and put it face down. “You work here?” he asked. “I live upstairs.” “In a room full of maps you never use.” “That’s rich coming from a man of God who never leaves his parish.” “I leave all the time. Weddings, funerals, hospital rooms. I leave in small shoes and with heavy coats.” “You can still pull a line.” “So can you when you want.” He looked around the room like he took stock of the lives pressed around us. The bar had its usual mix: two suits arguing over sports like it mattered, a woman with a notebook filling pages with angry angles, a man at the far end with a pack of cigarettes he turned in his fingers and never lit. “You eat?” Silas asked, landing a small bowl of nuts with an economy of movement that hid his limp again. “If I start, I’ll finish,” I said. “Then start. Dylan, you want a plate of chips or are you fasting for Lent?” “It’s June, mate.” “Then you have no excuse.” He nodded toward the kitchen hatch and vanished into a line only he could see. Dylan pushed the nuts around the bowl. He didn’t take any. He watched my face and it made my neck itch. “You were the quickest mind in a room full of quick minds,” he said. “You could slice through an argument and leave the rest of us patching ourselves up.” “You coming here to recruit me to your sermon club?” “You dodged every expectation like it was a low branch.” “You gave up band nights and came to God. Don’t act like you didn’t swerve hard.” “I swerved because I hit something. You swerved because the road was empty in front of you and you got bored.” “That’s the thing you always thought. That I did things just to see if I could.” “You always did things just to see if you could.” “I left because staying would have killed me.” He nodded once, slow. He didn’t ask for detail. He didn’t press the names. He didn’t make me recount the rooms, the kettle, the bruise that looked like a country on a map you couldn’t find again. The neon hummed and a bus pulled up outside with a sigh and kept going. “You didn’t come to the hearing when Evan got done for ABH,” he said. “News travels.” “Cardiff is small. You can hear bedroom doors close from Roath to Grangetown if you put your ear to the right wall.” “I was in London.” “You were hiding in London.” “Semantics.” “Language is your mother tongue, Rory. You left before you lost it.” I tipped the bottle back until I saw the bottom. The glass sweated into my palm. The label lifted at the corner and I worried it down. “You came in here looking for me?” I asked. “I came in here because long nights crack open old hours. I was walking past and the green sign looked like a harbour.” He shifted on the stool. “Part of me hoped you’d be everywhere, still. That I’d walk into any room and there you’d be, taking up air, making trouble.” “And part of you hoped I’d be gone.” “And part of me hoped I’d stop hoping.” Silas returned with chips that steamed and smelled like a fairground in winter. He set them down, left the pint of ketchup, then kept his body between us and the room for a second like he shielded a flame from a draught. “You friends of old or enemies of new?” he asked. “Old,” Dylan said. “Both,” I said. “That’s the right answer.” Silas pushed the chips to centre and drifted away again, ring flashing once, limp hidden by the bar. Dylan picked up a chip and turned it and didn’t eat. I took one and burned my tongue and still didn’t regret it. “Do you miss it?” he asked. “What.” “The arguing in rooms with judges and people who think words are knives.” “I argue with delivery drivers about who gets the last spring roll. It keeps me sharp.” “That’s not a yes.” “Neither is your collar a no.” We sat with that. “I used to stand outside the Law School and wait for you,” he said. “Do you remember that? We’d walk to Roath Park and sit on the bench by the fake lighthouse and you’d tell me all the ways the world was built wrong.” “And you’d tell me all the ways the world could be built right if people were nicer.” “And now I work out how to bury them well.” “That’s not fair.” “It isn’t. Nothing about it is.” The couple down the bar broke into a small fight over a phone. The woman with the notebook drew a slash across a page and then another. The man with the cigarettes put one in his mouth and didn’t light it and just breathed around it like a ritual. “You know I loved you, right?” Dylan said, eyes on his untouched chip. “It was hard to miss. You were not subtle.” “You loved me back a bit. Or you loved being loved.” “I didn’t have room then.” “You didn’t make room.” “My room was full of a man who decided what my room could hold.” He swallowed. His throat worked against the collar. “I told myself you wouldn’t have answered if I pushed the door,” he said. “I told myself it wasn’t my place. I told myself I’d make it worse. I told myself so many things I stopped hearing anything else.” “And if you had pushed it?” “I’d have been hit too.” “Then you made the right call.” “It doesn’t feel like that when I’m awake at three.” “You chose not to bleed with me.” “I chose a lot of things that make sense only on paper.” We didn’t look at each other for a minute. We watched other people’s lives happen in front of us and used them like shields. “I married Aisha,” he said after a while. “I gathered.” “She runs the community kitchen. We argue about God over potatoes.” “She wins.” “She always wins.” “I like her already.” “She’d like you.” “People you love like everyone who survives you.” “I didn’t survive you. You’re not dead.” “You thought I was dead to you.” “I thought you’d walked into a tunnel and every time I shouted your name it made no echo.” He finally ate the chip. It had gone lukewarm. He chewed like it hurt his teeth. “You want to come by St. Martin’s some time?” he asked. “No need to kneel. We have decent coffee. Children run around and no one stops them. Sometimes we sing in tune by accident.” “I don’t do kneeling.” “I know.” “And I don’t like coffee.” “We have tea.” “I live above a bar. You think I leave my nest?” “Birds leave to find food.” “Birds get eaten by bigger birds.” “I forget you make everything a fight.” “You make everything a sermon.” Silas slid a fresh ginger beer to me without a word. He topped Dylan’s glass with soda and tucked the lime back into place like he set a tile in a mosaic. He gave Dylan a look you use for men who carry too much and then he swept away a ring of glasses and made them sing a little as they knocked. “You going to tell your mam you saw me?” I asked. “She didn’t ask me to.” “But you will.” “I’ll tell her your face looks older and your eyes look…the same.” “You always liked my eyes.” “They still cut. You think that’s a compliment.” “I think that’s just true.” He tested his phone again, face unchanged by whatever he found. “I have evening prayers,” he said. “You sitting here praying now?” “I do that in supermarkets as well. It terrifies no one. It’s just breathing with words.” “Show-off.” “Stay angry. It suits you.” “Stay soft. It looks good on you.” He stood and pulled his coat on sleeve by sleeve like he’d learned patience in small movements. The white at his throat caught the neon and went green for a second. He put a note under his glass like an offering and then he hesitated with his hand on the back of the stool. “You could come by,” he said again. “Or I could come back here and we could keep hurling things at each other until one of us runs out.” “Silas will throw you out if you throw things.” “I’ll confess later.” “You confess now.” He looked at my wrist once more and then at my face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For not knocking harder.” “I’m sorry you thought you had to.” He nodded, just a tilt, not an end to anything, and then he turned and threaded his way through the tables, past the maps and the people hunched over their small storms. The door took him and with it a wash of night air and the sour hiss of the city. The green neon dragged a shadow over the floor and let it go. Silas collected the empty glasses and the half-eaten chips and the note under Dylan’s glass. “You okay, Carter?” “I’m on a stool in Soho. That’s the sum of it.” “Stools tip.” “Not these.” He left me with the maps and my old name ringing in my head like a bell you hear three streets away, faint and true and not calling you anywhere you already planned to go. I lifted the fresh bottle and held the chill of it until my fingers hurt and the hurt felt like something I chose.