Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTYNEHP0F9HXTXTK75CNDVA

The green neon buzzed above the door like a trapped insect. Rory balanced a stack of takeaway containers against her hip, shoulder wedged against the frame, and kicked the door open with her heel. The smell hit first—old wood, spilled lager, the ghost of a thousand cigarettes that hadn't been smoked indoors for over a decade but had soaked into the grain of the bar like memory. Half past ten on a Wednesday. The Raven's Nest held maybe a dozen bodies, most of them solo drinkers nursing their poison with the particular devotion of people who had nowhere pressing to be. Silas stood behind the bar polishing a glass he'd already polished twice, the way he did when his knee was bothering him and standing still felt better than pacing. "Yu-Fei says you still owe her for last Thursday," Rory said, setting the containers on the bar top. Silas didn't look up. "Yu-Fei says a lot of things." "She also says if you don't pay by Friday she's cutting you off. No more char siu, no more crispy duck, nothing." His hands stopped moving. "That woman runs her kitchen like a military operation." "That woman feeds you three nights a week." Rory slid the receipt across the bar. "Sign." He signed it with his left hand, the silver signet ring on his right catching the low amber light from the overhead fixtures. Then his gaze drifted over her shoulder toward the far corner booth, and something shifted in his expression—a tightening around the mouth, a slight narrowing of the eyes that she'd learned to read over the past year like weather changes. "Friend of yours?" Rory turned to look. The woman in the corner booth sat with both hands wrapped around a glass of red wine as though it were the only warm thing in the room. She was maybe late fifties, thin in a way that suggested discipline rather than deprivation. Silver hair cut sharp at the jaw. Good coat—dark navy, well-tailored. She stared at the wall of old photographs beside her booth like she was searching for a face in them. "Silas?" He set down the glass. Picked up another one. "I haven't seen that woman in fourteen years." Rory waited. She'd learned that too—how Silas parceled out information the way a miser parceled out coins, one at a time and only when the silence grew expensive enough. "Her name is Catherine Hale. We worked together. Before." Before. The word that covered everything from his previous life. Before the bar, before the limp, before whatever happened in Prague that he referred to only in the space between sentences. "She looks like she's waiting for someone." "She's not." Silas set both hands flat on the bar top. "She knows I'm here. She's giving me the choice." Rory glanced between them—the woman in the booth who hadn't once looked toward the bar, and Silas, whose stillness had taken on the quality of stone. "You going over?" "Get yourself a drink, Rory." He poured her a half-pint of the bitter she liked without waiting for an answer and then moved out from behind the bar. The limp was worse tonight. She watched him cross the room with the uneven gait that he usually masked better, each step deliberate, his reflection sliding across the old maps that papered the walls. Catherine Hale looked up when his shadow fell across her table. Something crossed her face—not surprise, not relief. Recognition. The kind that carried weight. "Silas." "Cate." Neither of them moved to embrace or shake hands. He slid into the booth across from her, and the leather seat exhaled beneath him. Rory turned away, positioned herself at the far end of the bar with her half-pint, and did what she did best—listened while appearing not to. "You look old," Catherine said. "You look thin." "I am thin. I am also old." She took a sip of her wine. "Your leg's worse." "My leg's the same it's been for twelve years." "You're favoring it more. You were always stubborn about the physio." "You came to London to discuss my physical therapy regime?" A pause. The jukebox in the corner—an actual jukebox, one of Silas' affectations—clicked between tracks and landed on something with a muted trumpet. "I retired," Catherine said. "Six months ago. They gave me a clock." "A clock." "Crystal. Quite hideous. Has an inscription. Thirty-one years of dedicated service." She turned the wine glass by its stem. "I keep it in the downstairs loo." "Fitting." "I thought so." Another pause. Rory took a sip of her bitter and studied the photographs on the wall nearest her—faces she didn't know, places she'd never been. Silas had never explained any of them. She'd stopped asking. "I'm in London for a conference," Catherine said. "Counter-intelligence symposium at the Royal United Services Institute. Advisory capacity. They trot us out like show horses now, the retired ones. We give talks about lessons learned, and everyone nods and then goes on to make exactly the same mistakes." "So nothing's changed." "Everything's changed. That's rather the problem." She set her wine glass down. "The kids they're sending out now—God, Silas. They're all algorithms and satellite feeds. Not one of them can sit in a café in Vienna for six hours watching a door without checking their phone." "You sound like every generation complaining about the next." "I sound like someone who knows what the work costs." That landed. Rory saw it—the way Silas' shoulders pulled back a fraction, the way his right hand moved to his left knee beneath the table. Unconscious. A tell, if you knew what to look for. "Is that why you're here?" His voice had dropped half a register. "To reminisce about costs?" Catherine didn't answer immediately. She looked at the photographs on the wall again, and this time Rory followed her gaze to a particular one—black and white, slightly overexposed. Three people standing in front of what looked like a bridge, winter coats, blurred faces. Rory had walked past it a hundred times without noticing it. "That one's new," Catherine said. "It's been up for nine years." "Then it's new since the last time I was here." Silence. The trumpet on the jukebox found a note and held it, trembling. "You came once," Silas said. "You came once, in the first year. Sat in that exact seat. Drank exactly one glass of that same terrible Merlot and told me I was wasting myself." "You were." "And then you left, and I didn't hear from you for fourteen years. No call when Margaret died. Nothing when they gave me the discharge papers. Not a word." "I know." "So why now, Cate?" She pressed her thumb against the base of her wine glass and watched the red shift and settle. In the bar's low light, the lines around her eyes deepened into something that looked carved rather than worn. "Robert's dead." Rory didn't know the name, but she knew its impact. Silas went still in a way that was different from his usual composure—not the deliberate stillness of a man who had trained himself to hold, but the involuntary freeze of something struck. "When?" "Three weeks ago. Pancreatic. Fast, at least. His daughter called me. Apparently he'd left instructions." "Instructions." "He wanted us both notified. Specifically. By name." She reached into the pocket of her coat and produced an envelope—heavy cream stock, unsealed. She placed it on the table between them. "His daughter said he'd written these before the diagnosis. Before he even knew." Silas looked at the envelope the way a man looks at an unexploded device he's been trained to defuse but hasn't touched in years. He didn't pick it up. "Robert Hale," he said. "Your husband." "My ex-husband. For twenty-two years now." "Your ex-husband who I—" "Yes." The word shut the sentence like a door. Rory's fingers tightened around her glass. She understood, without specifics, the topography of what lay between these two people. A shared history that had fault lines running through it. "I didn't come to open anything, Silas." Catherine's voice had shifted. Quieter. Stripped of the sardonic edge she'd been wielding like a screen. "I came because a man who meant something to both of us is gone, and I didn't want to carry that envelope around anymore. It's yours. Whatever's in it is between you and him." "He's dead, Cate. There is no between." "Then it's between you and whatever you did with what happened." Silas' jaw worked. His hazel eyes had gone dark, the amber gone out of them like a fire banked for the night. He looked at the envelope, then at Catherine, then past her to the photographs on the wall—that overexposed shot of three people on a bridge in winter. "Prague," he said. "Yes." "He was the third." "He was always the third. In everything." Catherine picked up her wine and finished it in one long swallow, then set the glass down with a precision that spoke of practice. "I blamed you for a long time. You know that." "You told me. Quite clearly. In that debrief room with four people watching." "I blamed you because it was easier than blaming the work. Or blaming him for volunteering. Or blaming myself for not—" She stopped. Drew a breath through her nose. "I was very good at blame, back then. World class. Could have gone professional." "You did go professional. We all did." A ghost of a smile. It didn't reach her eyes. "I suppose we did." Rory set her glass down silently and slipped off the bar stool. She moved to the back of the bar, found the bottle of Jameson that Silas kept on the third shelf for occasions he never specified, and poured two measures into short glasses. She carried them to the booth without a word, set one in front of each of them, and walked back to her station. Catherine looked at the whiskey, then across the room at Rory with an expression of mild surprise. "She yours?" Catherine asked. "She lives upstairs. She's no one's." "Smart girl." "Too smart for delivery work. I keep telling her that." "You always did collect strays." "And you always mistook keeping people close for collecting them." Catherine picked up the whiskey. Held it but didn't drink. "I came to say I'm sorry, Silas. Not for the debrief. For the fourteen years after it." He looked at her for a long time. His hand found the envelope on the table and his fingers rested on its edge—not gripping, not pushing it away. Just touching it, the way you touch something to confirm it's real. "Robert wrote to me. A dying man wrote letters to settle what the living couldn't be bothered to." "That's not—" "That's exactly what happened." His voice was even. Almost gentle. Which was worse, Rory thought. The gentleness meant the anger had aged past heat into something colder and more permanent. "You retired six months ago. You could have come then. You could have come any time in fourteen years. You chose to come now because a dead man gave you permission." Catherine set the whiskey down without drinking it. Her hand was steady. Everything about her was steady except her eyes, which had taken on the bright, hard quality of something under pressure. "You're right." "I know I'm right." "And I know that my being right about your leg doesn't make you stretch it. We're very good at knowing and very poor at doing. Both of us. All three of us." She glanced at the envelope. "Robert included." The jukebox clicked again. The trumpet was gone, replaced by piano—sparse, unhurried. Silas picked up the whiskey. He didn't toast. He didn't say a word. He drank it the way he did everything now—measured, deliberate, alone even in company. Then he slid the envelope into the inside pocket of his waistcoat and placed both hands flat on the table. "Stay for another glass," he said. Not warm. Not cold. Factual, like a weather report. "I'll pour you something that isn't that Merlot." Catherine studied his face. Whatever she found there, it was enough. She nodded once. Silas stood, the left leg straightening a beat behind the right, and made his way back toward the bar. He passed Rory without meeting her eyes, but his hand brushed the bar top near her elbow—a gesture so brief it could have been accidental if she didn't know him. She stayed where she was, nursing the last of her bitter, watching him select a bottle from the shelf with the same care he gave to everything that mattered. Across the room, Catherine Hale sat alone in the booth beneath photographs of people and places that had outlived their context, her steady hands folded on the table, waiting for a glass of something better from a man she'd wounded by absence—the quietest and most durable weapon either of them had ever deployed.