AI The green neon above the door hummed and threw a sickly light across the puddled pavement. Inside, the Raven's Nest smelled of old tobacco and orange peel; maps lay pinned like small, tired flags along the walls. A black-and-white photograph leaned against the bar, its edges softened by years of fingers. Silas moved behind the counter like someone shuffling through familiar pages—glass in one hand, cloth in the other—his right hand steady because of the signet ring, his left leg hitching now and then with the old limp. He watched the door the way a man watched a street he once knew by heart, though he didn't expect anyone.
The bell over the door knocked once and then again. A draft chased her in, and it felt like Cardiff in miniature: rain, a smell of iron, the sharpness of cold. She stopped a step inside, coat dripping, hair clinging to her cheeks, bright blue eyes taking the room in like she was testing its bones. Silas had not seen that look on her since she had been nineteen and stubborn and full of ideas that could tidy the world. He almost laughed at how it hit him—then set the glass on the bar on purposefully firm fingers.
"You," he said, because it was the cleanest thing left between them.
She shrugged off the coat and let it fall over the back of a chair. The sleeve rode up at the wrist and the crescent-shaped scar caught the light, pale against her skin. Her smile was small and flat, not a welcome.
"Silas," she returned, and the name curved at the edges like a question that refused to fold into itself.
He came forward, slower than he had once moved, and stopped at the foot of the bar as though the step had been newly placed. The limp tightened. He rested one palm on the wood and leaned in the way men leaned when they wanted to be nearer without naming why.
"You lived above my bar all this time and didn't knock?"
A laugh that wasn't quite a laugh. "Next door's a better landlord," she said. "Less conversation."
He studied her as leaves fall and decide where to rest. Her hair had grown straighter and shorter. The law books he'd pictured on her shelf had been traded for a small courier bag she hung on her chair. Where once she'd folded into discussions about statutes and precedent, now she talked in the timeframes of deliveries and shifts.
"The Golden Empress," he said. "Yu-Fei's kitchen? You never liked coriander."
She moved a glass forward and set her palms on the rim. The veins showed like blue threads. "They taught me to like what's fast," she said. "And what pays without promises."
Silas set the glass down and poured whiskey into it without taking his eyes off her. The sound of liquid in glass was a punctuation.
"Rory," he said again, and the syllable sat between them like a small, fragile crate.
She watched the amber flood the glass, then reached for it with a composed hand. She didn't pick it up.
"You look… different," he added, a clumsy attempt to cross the space he had opened.
She smiled then, not without humour. "You mean older," she said. "More knee and less mystery. Retirement hasn't been cruel to you."
He let that land . He rubbed the ring on his finger with the pad of his thumb, the slow motion of a man who had used silence as another tool for years. "You left," he said. "Cardiff. You vanished."
Her laugh cracked. "You could say that. Evan's idea of a conversation was an interrogation. It was simpler to walk."
Silas's face shifted for a breath but his voice stayed even. "You told me you wanted to finish Pre-Law."
She rolled her chin, and something sharp passed through her face like knife light. "Wanted. It's funny when language keeps the shape of intention after the meat's gone. I wanted to be someone else."
A beat. The maps on the walls creased under the light. Outside, a bus hissed past. Inside, the bar listened.
"You could have written," he said.
She plucked at a loose thread on the barstool as if it were an uncomfortable memory. "You could have called," she returned. "You disappeared too, Silas. Noise and silence happen at the same time when people get clever."
He flinched. The limp caught him for an instant; his jaw tightened. For a minute the room felt like an interrogation room he'd once sat in. "Prague," he said, and the word was dry . "I left because I had to go."
"You left because you wanted to," she said. "You always did that—pick a window and jump through it without telling anyone if the landing was soft."
He set the glass down with a small clack. "That operation went wrong," he said. "I learned that the windows close faster than we plan."
She looked at him, and he saw the old schoolgirl flicker ; then the blue hardened like ice. "You learned. I learned a bruise will never be explained into a scar unless it finds air."
Silas let out a breath and the muscles around his eyes thinned. "I should have known better than to think I could fix everything with… distance."
"I didn't need fixing," she cut in, and the words were precise . "I needed someone to stand in the doorway."
Silence thickened. The bar's overhead light gave the maps a washed look, and a photograph on the wall caught the corner of a face that looked like someone who had been waiting too long.
"You had Evan," he said at last. "I saw him once. Not in the flesh, but in my files . It's a small world when people make a profession of noticing small things."
She let the glass go and watched the rim with both palms flat on the wood. "You kept a file and not a hand," she said. "I remember you offering me a place to stay once. I remember laughing at you because I didn't think you ever stayed anywhere."
He softened the distance with something like a half-smile . "I used to move on places. Now I move bottles."
"Does that feel better?" she asked.
He looked at the wall of maps, fingers steadying on the spines of the photographs. "Sometimes it felt worse. Sometimes it felt right to remember where you had been, even if you couldn't unstep the street."
She sat back, crossed her arms, and the scar showed again when she adjusted her sleeve. "You always knew how to make a room smaller," she said. "You could fold conversation into compartments so neat that other people couldn't find the edges anymore."
He eyed her hands. "You changed your name on the list in Cardiff. You used an alias with Eva for a while. What do you call yourself now?"
"Rory," she said, and it had the weight of an anchor. "That never left."
He chuckled, low. "Rory, who loved statutes and coffee at three in the morning. Rory who argued like she was doing battle with boredom."
Rory's mouth turned. "You remember odd things."
"I kept odd things," he said. "Like photos. Like the way you used to tap a pencil against a book and expect it to open."
She lifted the glass then and took one measured swallow. The whiskey caught at the back of her throat and eased down like someone loosening a belt. "It's bitter," she observed.
"So is trying to be what you thought you'd be," he replied. "You work for a restaurant again. You live above my bar. We're both in new forms of currency."
"You turned a front into a life," she said. "That's a kind of honesty I didn't expect."
He winced so slightly his left cheek creased. "You make it sound like I sold out."
She tapped the rim with her nail. "You sold something and kept the profit to stare at maps. Don't romanticise a limp."
They both smiled then, a thin exchange that closed something and opened something new. Conversation moved like that in rooms that had once been used for trade in other currencies—now trade took the shape of stories and half-apologies.
"Did you see Brendan?" she asked suddenly , and the name cut sharper than the rest.
Silas's hand froze on the counter. "Not since he came through here before I opened the bar. He still argued at me about a stop in Prague."
Her fingers clenched into a small fist. "He defended me over that scholarship interview. He always had this idea that the law could be moral if you rubbed it right."
"He would be proud," Silas said, and it wasn't meant to close the wound, only to acknowledge it.
She gave a little sound that might have been a laugh if it didn't bruise. "Mum called me a coward once for leaving. She called me everything on the phone until I told her to stop using the rain as a metaphor."
"She does that," he said, soft . "Jennifer's hands were always full. She would make you tea and then tell you you were drying the kettle wrong."
The way he said her mother's name—familiar and almost fond—unmoored something in Rory. Her shoulders dipped, then steadied. "She kept my records," she said. "When I left Cardiff, she kept a copy of my coursework. She told me not to burn bridges because they were the only proof you had of standing."
Silas looked at her and understood then how time had written on her face. There had been a hardness to protect something fragile underneath, like a plate that could not be shattered because it no longer allowed itself to be struck.
"You forgave me for Prague, eventually," he said. "I didn't mean to vanish. I thought it was safer that way."
She met his eyes; the blue was like weather. "I forgave you because forgiveness is a currency you spent when you had nothing else," she answered. "I forgave you and then I learned not to lean on broken things."
His hand moved and he brushed the signet ring, making a circle of light on the wood. "You could have knocked," he said, but there was a steadying in his voice now, as if he had been rehearsing the sentence for years and finally decided to let it out. "You could have even left a note."
She considered the glass. "I left notes all the time," she said. "On the backs of menus. At the Golden Empress, you can leave a note behind a napkin and it won't be there when you come back. It drifts. People eat things and forget you were part of the table."
There was a rawness in her that did not ask for pity. It simply stated fact and expected no remedy. Silas felt the old impulse to fix, to rearrange; he swallowed it.
"We were different to each other then," he said at length. "You were the bright kind of dangerous—wanted to prove the world wrong. I was quieter, thinking I could map the world to make it softer. We both failed and from the ruins we made new maps."
"You make it sound like a geography lesson," she said.
"It is," he replied. "And you always loved maps."
She smiled, small and private, and the neon over the door buzzed as if it, too, were listening .
Outside, the rain hit the windows like someone impatient at the threshold. The bar hummed with its own memory. They had miles layered between them; not just geography, but the slow erosion of expectation . Words, then, were the way they excavated what remained.
"So," she said, and the single syllable held more than a question. "What do you do when your windows close?"
Silas looked at her, at the scar, at the courier bag, at the way she set her jaw like someone steadying a load. "You learn to open other doors," he answered. "And you keep two kinds of light: one for reading and one for seeing what someone brings with them."
She drank then, and the whiskey burned the place where memory pooled.
"I left to be safe," she said. "I found out that safe is a small cage."
He reached across the bar as if to take her hand and stopped the motion because he didn't want to scare the truth.
"You could come more often," he said. "Even if it's just to tell me the world is getting smaller in new ways."
She looked at him, and in that look there were years of unsaid sentences and small, private reckonings. She folded her hands around the glass and for the first time in the evening, she let herself slide off the edge of performance.
"I will," she said, and it was not a promise so much as a new cartel between them. "But not because you asked. Because sometimes you create rooms and forget to put people in the chairs."
He nodded, slow as a tide. "Then sit," he said. "Tell me which deliveries make you laugh, which ones make you slow your step. Tell me who left their watch behind and how it ticked like a broken promise."
She laughed then, a sound that loosened the corners of both their mouths. "You always had a way with metaphors."
"Only the rusty ones," he admitted.
They spoke the way people undo knots—patiently, English, with hands busy and voices even. Stories unspooled: small ones about a lost order at the Golden Empress, a larger one about Evan and the nights she learned not to hope for rescue, fragments about parents and old mistakes. They did not fix each other. They did not intend to. They filled the bar with talk instead, and with the motion of two friends finding a route back through vocabulary.