Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTZ1AT99PPREYTQGM2SWPZE

The green neon buzzed against the windowpane, casting its sickly glow across the rain-slicked pavement of Soho. Rory pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest, the familiar creak of hinges announcing her arrival. She didn't mean to stay—just a quick word with Silas about tomorrow's shift, maybe steal a chip from whatever he had cooking in the back. But the figure hunched over the far corner booth stopped her cold. She knew that posture. The slope of those shoulders. The way a hand reached up to tug at an earlobe whenever its owner hit a particularly difficult problem. No. The man looked up, and Rory's stomach dropped. "Marcus?" He blinked. Twice. Then his face split into that crooked grin she remembered from late-night study sessions in the Cardiff library, from shared cigarettes behind the law building, from a thousand small moments she'd buried somewhere deep and stopped thinking about years ago. "Rory Carter." He laughed, the sound too loud in the quiet bar. "I don't believe it." She should have turned around. Should have mumbled something about needing to check on a delivery and disappeared up the narrow stairs to her flat. Instead, her feet carried her toward the booth, each step feeling like walking through wet concrete. Marcus Chen had been beautiful once. Not in the way that stopped traffic, but in the way that made people turn twice—the kind of handsome that crept up on you. Sharp cheekbones, warm brown eyes, black hair that fell across his forehead when he laughed. Rory had spent three years of university sitting across from that face, arguing about tort reform and stealing his chips and pretending she didn't notice the way he looked at her sometimes. The man sitting before her was a ruin of that boy. His cheekbones still cut sharp, but hollow now, dark circles beneath eyes that seemed to struggle to focus. His suit hung off his frame—expensive, Rory noted, the cut and fabric screaming money, but wrong somehow. Ill-fitting. Like he'd bought it for a body he no longer occupied. His hands trembled slightly where they wrapped around an empty tumbler. "Sit." He gestured at the seat opposite him. "God, it's been what—four years? Five?" "Four." She slid into the booth. "You're in London." "In London." He nodded, then seemed to think better of it and pressed his palm flat against the table, steadying himself. "Up from Cardiff last year. Got offered a position at Morrison & Pierce. Corporate law." His smile flickered. "The dream, right?" The dream. That's what they'd called it back then—the two of them hunched over textbooks in the student union, plotting their escape from everything. They were going to conquer London together. Make names for themselves. Rory would prosecute, Marcus would defend, and they'd spend their careers on opposite sides of the courtroom but the same side of every dinner table. She'd written him a letter, in the end. Three sentences explaining nothing, apologising for less. She'd never even found out if he'd finished reading it before she blocked his number and caught the first train out of Cardiff. "I heard you made partner," she said. "Junior partner." His fingers drummed against the glass. "Two years ahead of schedule. Mum cried. Dad bought a round for the entire restaurant." "That's brilliant, Marcus." "Is it?" The question hung between them. He met her eyes, and for a moment she saw through the fog of whatever substance currently dulled his edges—the Marcus she'd known, sharp and fierce and quietly ambitious. Then it slipped away, and he was a stranger again. "You look good," he said. "Different, but good. Did you cut your hair?" "Years ago." "It suits you. Shorter. Makes your eyes stand out more." She touched her shoulder without thinking. "What are you doing here, Marcus? This isn't exactly a Morrison & Pierce kind of establishment." "What, a man can't enjoy a quiet drink?" He signalled toward the bar, where Silas was polishing glasses with the studied disinterest of someone who'd seen far worse than a trembling lawyer nursing his demons. "Another whiskey. And whatever she's having." "I'm not staying." "One drink." His voice cracked on the word. "Please. For old times' sake." Old times. The phrase sat wrong, like wearing someone else's shoes. There was nothing old about this moment, nothing familiar except the shape of his face and the cadence of his speech. Everything else was new and terrible—the emptiness behind his eyes, the way his hands couldn't stay still, the expensive watch that caught the dim light every time he reached for a glass that wasn't there. Silas approached with two whiskeys, setting one before each of them without comment. His eyes lingered on Rory's face for a fraction of a second—a question, an offer—before he retreated to the bar. She appreciated that about him. He never pushed. "Cheers." Marcus raised his glass. His hand shook. "To old friends." Rory didn't lift hers. "What happened?" "Nothing happened." "Something happened. You look like—" "Like what?" The crooked grin returned, but warped now, bitter at the edges. "Like I haven't slept in a week? Like I can't remember the last time I ate a proper meal? Like I'm three whiskeys deep on a Tuesday night in a bar I only found because I was trying to walk until my legs gave out?" "I was going to say you look like you need help." "Help." He laughed, sharp and ugly. "Everyone needs help, Rory. That's the great joke of it all. We're all just stumbling around pretending we've got it together, and none of us do. None of us." The words came out slurred now, and she wondered how much he'd had before she walked in. Wondered how often he sat in bars like this one, in corners like this, talking to people who weren't really listening because everyone was too busy pretending they didn't have their own ghosts. "I left," she said quietly. "I know I left. But you could have called. You could have—" "Could have what?" He leaned forward, and the whiskey smell rolled off him in waves. "Chased after you? Begged you to stay? Asked why the girl I'd known for three years suddenly decided I wasn't worth a proper goodbye?" "I wrote—" "A letter." His hand slammed the table. The glasses jumped. "You wrote a letter. Three paragraphs, Rory. Three. I counted them. I counted every single word, and do you know what I found?" She shook her head. "Two hundred and fourteen. Two hundred and fourteen words to throw away everything we had." He slumped back. "I have them memorised. Isn't that pathetic? I can recite your goodbye letter from memory, but I can't remember my own mother's birthday half the time." "Marcus—" "You said you needed to find yourself. Said you were sorry. Said you hoped I'd understand." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I didn't understand. I never understood. I still don't." Rory reached for her glass. The whiskey burned, but she welcomed it—something to focus on that wasn't the ruin of her friend, the wreckage of whatever they'd once been. "Evan happened," she said. The name tasted like ash. "After I left. He found me in London. It's a long story, and I don't—" "Evan." Marcus's brow furrowed. "That's the ex, yeah? The one who—" "The one who broke my wrist. The one who made me afraid to answer my phone. The one who showed up at my flat at three in the morning screaming that I belonged to him." She turned her left wrist over, showing the crescent scar. "This wasn't from a childhood accident. I lied about that too. I lied about a lot of things." The confession hung there, and she watched Marcus process it, watched the pieces rearrange behind his eyes. He'd known, of course. Known about Evan, known about the problems she'd never quite managed to hide. He'd just never known the extent of it. No one had. "I could have helped." "No. You couldn't." "You don't know that." "I do know that." She met his gaze steadily. "You were going places. You were going to be someone. The last thing you needed was me dragging you down into my mess." "That was my choice to make." "Was it?" They stared at each other across the table. Two people who had once known each other's thoughts before they were spoken, now struggling to bridge a gap that four years of silence had carved between them. "You're different now," Marcus said finally. "Harder. There's something in your eyes that wasn't there before." "People change." "They do." He finished his whiskey in one long swallow and set the glass down with more precision than his earlier movements had suggested he possessed. "I'm different too. Not better, necessarily. But different. The firm eats people, Rory. Chews them up and spits out whatever's left. I thought I wanted it. The money, the status, the validation of proving everyone who ever doubted me wrong. But it turns out you can win every battle and still lose the war." "Then quit." "Quit?" He laughed again, but softer this time. "And do what? Go back to Cardiff? Tell my parents their only son threw away a partnership because he was tired?" "There are worse things than being tired." "Are there?" He spread his hands, and she saw the tremor still there, the itch beneath his skin that no amount of whiskey would scratch. "I spent my whole life working toward this. Working toward being someone. And now I am someone, and I've never been more alone. I have a flat in Mayfair that I'm never in. I have colleagues who'd stab me in the back for a promotion. I have more money than I know what to do with and absolutely no one to spend it on." "That sounds like a choice." "Everything's a choice, isn't it?" His smile didn't reach his eyes. "You chose to leave. I chose to stay. Now here we are, two ghosts in a bar, pretending we haven't spent the last four years thinking about each other." Rory didn't deny it. Couldn't. He was right, and they both knew it—every word he said was true. She had thought about him. Wondered about him. Let his face drift through her mind on nights when sleep wouldn't come and her flat felt too empty and too full all at once. "I'm sorry," she said. "For the letter. For not explaining. For leaving you to wonder." "Two hundred and fourteen words." He smiled, and this time it was almost genuine. "You know, I practised what I'd say if I ever saw you again. Rehearsed it. Had this whole speech prepared about how angry I was, how much you'd hurt me, how I never wanted to see your face again." "And now?" "Now I can't remember a single word of it." He signalled for another drink. Silas didn't move from his position at the bar. "I think I just wanted you to know I'm still here. Even if here isn't anywhere good."