AI Rain had carved the pavement into small running rivers by the time Aurora pushed through the battered glass of the Raven's Nest. The green neon above the door buzzed and blurred against the wet. Inside, the light poured over maps and black-and-white faces, making them look like ghosts caught mid-breath. A radio hummed low behind the bar. The place smelled of lemon oil and old paper, of beer and something faintly metallic she could not place.
She stood in the doorway with a delivery bag sagging against one hip and the sleeve of her coat plastered to her arm. For a moment she simply watched the bar. He was behind it, a silhouette at first: a tall frame, the way he leaned on one leg more than the other. Close up she saw the hair—grey threaded through the auburn—and the neat beard. The limp was the small, private thing she had only ever seen in pictures once. The signet ring on his right hand caught the neon and flashed like a private signal.
Silas lifted his head and smiled like he had been expecting her.
"Aurora."
He said it as if the name had been kept in a drawer and then slid back into her palm.
She closed the door with her shoulder and let the damp coat hang. Her fingers brushed the crescent scar on her left wrist before she realised she had done it. Habit more than memory.
"Silas."
He wiped a glass with a cloth that had seen too many spills. When he set it down the motion was precise, practised. The limp slowed his step as he crossed the floor.
"You look like you could use a dry shirt," he said, and tapped the bar with the ring.
She laughed once. The sound didn't fit the room. "I deliver for the Golden Empress. Dry shirts are optional."
He poured her a drink without taking his eyes off her, then set it in front of her with a little nod. "You changed your name," he said. "Or your mother did."
She pulled the collar of her coat up and pretended the words made sense. "Everyone shortens names. You were always stupidly formal."
Silas's eyes closed briefly, not as if in pain but as if folding an old photograph . When he opened them the lines at the corners had deeper trenches.
"You were always running, too."
"I left," she said. She didn't say why. The word hit the bar and landed soft, like a coin.
He ran a thumb over the rim of his glass, unaware. He looked at the maps pinned on the wall as if tracing routes with memory rather than sight .
"You were eighteen," he said finally . "You told me once you'd be a lawyer and then you'd fix everything. You left before you could. Did you fix anything?"
She put her hand flat on the bar and looked down at her reflection in the varnish. The blue of her eyes was brighter, washed in neon. "I deliver food," she said. "I read other people's excuses in the back of a Lifu. It doesn't look like fixing."
Silas's mouth tightened. "I thought law suited you. You were stubborn in the best way."
"You think I'm not stubborn now?" The retort was sharper than she intended.
He lifted his shoulders, a small ease of an actor. "I think you took all that stubbornness and hid it under a uniform."
She reached into the bag and pulled a foil container from the warm interior, more because it anchored her hands than hunger. She hadn't meant to bring it in. It had been the last of tonight's rounds.
"You never call me Rory," she said, watching the way the word landed between them like a small animal.
Silas slid a photograph from under the coaster and set it in front of her. It was black and white, frayed at the edges: two kids in a garden, a younger Silas with hair still brown and a tie askew, and a small girl with hair cropped too short for the weather. Someone had written nonsense along the bottom—Laila and Si, two thieves in a very small orchard.
"You called me Laila then," she said, fingers hovering over the paper . She did not pick it up. "Malphora for charm and ridiculousness."
He watched her with a patience she recognised like a map whose compass always pointed the same way. "Laila stuck because you screamed it every time you stole something."
She laughed, quieter now.
"What happened to you, Si?" she asked. "I used to picture you in some far-off office, red pen behind your ear, being sensible."
He looked down at his hands as if seeing the signet ring for the first time . "I made a choice," he said. "The world took the rest."
"Prague," she said.
He didn't blink. The name hung between them like an unopened letter. The maps behind him seemed to fold in on themselves.
"It was messy," he said. He set the cloth aside and ran his fingers along the row of bottles with habitual familiarity. "I left the game before the game left me."
She felt the room tilt through the doorframe. "You left me the night I needed someone."
Silas's face did not change. He moved behind the bar as if to open a drawer but paused.
"You left your number," she said. "You told me to call. I called once. The line cut out."
He bit the inside of his cheek, then shook his head like a man clearing fog.
"I thought you'd reach me," he said softly . "I thought you were with Eva."
"Eva told me to come to London," she said. Her voice hardened. "She said it would be easier if I disappeared. You gave me the card, and then you vanished into Prague and—"
"Do you think I vanished?" He leaned forward, elbows on the counter, his limp forgotten for a breath. "Do you think I sat in some parisian café and drank my regrets?"
"No," she said. The single syllable was flat. "You were there when you had to be."
He let out a small sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh. "I was there in other ways. I had to cut a line, Aurora. People die when you keep lines open. You taught me that once."
Her hand tightened on the foil. The crescent scar on her wrist pressed into the cloth. A map of cardiff suddenly stood out among the pinned world, its edges softer because it had seen rain.
"You were always careful with the dangerous things," she said. "You thought you could take care of everyone. You tried to take care of me and somehow left the window open."
He did not answer immediately. He went to the bookshelf at the back and ran a finger along the spines. He stopped at an empty gap and pulled, and a row of encyclopedias shifted sideways. For a moment the secret room they had used once flickered into existence; light showed from its edge like a memory of warmth . He didn't open it.
"You were not the only one with bad timing," he said. "I thought closing the door kept you safe. I might have slammed it."
She watched him, and she could see the old Silas—the man who had taught her to fold paper into flares and to listen for the space between words—pull into the present and find it messy. The limp tugged at the rhythm of him. The ring kept catching the light and they both looked at it as if it were a small, private world.
"Why here?" she asked after a long silence . "Why a bar? Why maps?"
He smiled without humour. "Maps are honest. They tell you where you are. Bars, too—people tell the truth when they're a little lost."
She lifted the foil box, opened it, and the steam rose like a thin excuse.
"You kept a named life that matched a person I used to be," she said. "I moved into the flat above your bar and didn't come down for months."
Silas's eyes watched as if she had put a plaster over a wound and then peeled it off.
"You lived there?" His voice trembled like a line in a song she had not heard in years.
She nodded. "I needed distance. From Evan. From Cardiff. From decisions."
He ran his thumb over the coaster until the rim was glossy.
"You could have knocked," he said. "I would have known how to hide you."
"I didn't want to be hidden," she said. "I wanted to leave. I wanted to count the days until the bruises faded and the nights were mine again."
Silas's face changed, the way a tide changes when something heavy passes beneath. For a heartbeat he looked younger, like the man in the photograph, as if the years were an elastic thing he could stretch and let snap back.
"You look tired," he said. "Not from work. From holding."
She looked at him then, and something loosened in her chest like a clasp. "And you?"
He drained his glass and set it down with care. "I took the burdens that didn't belong to me and made them my furniture. Now they sit in corners and I keep bumping into them."
They sat that way for a long time, talking in small bursts that braided the past and the present. She spoke of Evan in clipped declarative lines, the way she had to move out of hearing range of a name. He listened and kept asking about the practical things—dates, addresses, the name of the woman who had pulled her away—until she realised he was building a map again, one not drawn on the wall but on a space in which she could stand.
"Would you have wanted me to call?" she asked then, because a question like that was a vow on its edge.
"I would have answered," he said. The certainty in the words landed like a stone. "I would have rearranged the whole city for an excuse to be with you."
She let out a sound that matched the rain outside, wet and sharp. "You did not."
"I thought you wanted to be far," he said. "I thought you needed to choose."
She looked at him, at the signet ring, at the maps, at the small, private scars hidden like trivia.
"I chose flight over fight," she said. "I packed boxes and I left the courtroom and I thought if I kept moving nothing would catch up."
He made a small motion with his hand. "You always underestimated who would follow."
A man at the end of the bar laughed at something on the radio and the sound cut through. The bar felt suddenly like a boat rocking between two shores.
"Do you ever regret not going back?" Silas asked, softer .
She stared at the little crescent on her wrist and then at his face as if trying to prove to herself that the years had not been a lie .
"Every night," she admitted. The confession came out like a single coin placed on the counter. "Regret is a shape. It fits differently when you move."
He leaned in, the line of his body attentive like a listening device. "What if regret asked for directions?"
She almost smiled. "I'd give it yours."
He reached out and tapped the scar with a finger that had once been steadier. "You always chose fight when you had to," he said. "Maybe you chose the wrong fights."
"Maybe," she said. She flipped the photograph over and found a note on the back in a hand she recognised—his handwriting, precise, a joke she could not remember.
"You keep this here," she said. "On your bar. For show."
He took the photograph and slipped it into his breast pocket, fingers lingering on the paper. "For the book of what could have been," he answered.
The radio shifted to a song with a slow guitar and someone called last orders in the street outside like a permission.
"You could open the door," she said quietly. "To the room we used to hide in."
He looked at the bookshelf, at the gap he'd failed to open earlier. For a second the past stood with its foot half across the threshold like someone waiting. Then he smiled, small and private.
"I will," he said. "But first tell me what Eva did. Tell me why you left the numbers in a shoebox."
She inhaled. She had kept that shoebox against her mattress for two years. She had kept it like a secret and like a map.
"Evan," she began. The name was a knot she had unpicked in the dark and resealed with silence . "He taught me how to fold apologies into hands. Eva gave me a ticket and a bag. She told me to run like the flames were on the other side of the road."
Silas's hand found the ring and rubbed the metal as if feeling for engravings that the years had stolen .
"I asked you once to trust me," he said. "You didn't."
She pressed her fingers to her wrist again, the crescent warm under the skin.
"You taught me to survive without trust," she said. "And I learned how to keep doors shut."
Silas snorted, then softened. "We keep the doors we can open," he said. "And we pretend the rest is solid."
They sat in the echo the sentence made. Outside, the rain thinned to a mist that made the neon bleed into the wet pavement.
"I didn't come here to forgive," she said after a long pause. "I came because I couldn't sleep and the bar was below my window and your light was stubborn."
He looked up at the ceiling as if reading the map of his life in the plaster cracks . "Fine," he said. "Then stay. For now."
She thought of the flat above, of the nights she had shelved herself into of not-knowing. She thought of the delivery routes that traced the city like scaffolding for her life. She thought of maps that did not account for heart.
"Si," she said, the nickname falling from her like a small chain snapped loose. "Don't call me that in front of anyone. You'll ruin my reputation."
He grinned in a way that slid the years back a notch, and the limp folded like a page.
"Only in private," he said.
The bell above the door jingled and someone stepped in, shaking rain from their umbrella. The moment flickered . It was ordinary, ridiculous. It was everything. She felt older than the photograph in his pocket and lighter than the bag at her hip.
They did not fix anything. They did not close the shutters on what had been left open. But the maps on the wall looked different, less like accusations and more like possibilities. The radio played on, the bar hummed, and two people folded a new route together aloud, one sentence at a time.