Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMKM25DJ8FPBXEHYH7Y

The Raven's Nest was quiet on Tuesday evenings. That was why Rory liked them. She sat at the far end of the bar with a glass of red she hadn't touched in twenty minutes, her delivery bag slung over the back of the stool, still smelling of noodles and sesame oil. The last run of the night had taken her past the BFI, along the Embankment and back up through Soho in the rain, and now her hair was damp and her jacket was hanging off the hook by the door and she didn't particularly want to climb the stairs to her flat. She wanted the low lighting and the old maps on the walls and the sound of Silas moving bottles around behind the bar. The handful of other patrons were tucked into booths, speaking in low voices. A couple near the window were arguing about something with the careful restraint of people who knew they were in public. The jazz coming through the speakers was something slow and trumpet-heavy that Rory didn't recognise. "You going to drink that or just keep staring at it?" Silas set a fresh glass of water beside her without being asked. "I'm building anticipation." "Mm." He moved back along the bar, polishing something he'd already polished. The door opened. Cold air curled in along the floor. Rory didn't look up immediately — she was reading a smudged receipt she'd found in her jacket pocket, trying to determine if it was hers — but the woman who came in was tall enough to pull the eye. She stood just inside the threshold, scanning the room with the particular habit of someone deciding whether to stay or go, and her gaze passed over the booths and the couple by the window and the photographs on the walls and landed, eventually, on Rory. Rory looked up. The receipt fell out of her fingers. "God," the woman said, from across the room. She was different and the same in a way that made Rory's chest do something involuntary. The cheekbones were the same. The slight asymmetry of her mouth, one corner always pulled a fraction higher than the other. But her hair was short now, cropped close on one side, and there was something in the way she held herself — careful, deliberate — that hadn't been there at eighteen. "Niamh." Rory got off the stool. Niamh Walsh crossed the room and they stood opposite each other for a moment with the bar between them in every sense. Then Niamh made a small, helpless gesture with one hand, and Rory went around and they hugged, briefly and a little awkwardly, the way people do when they haven't established whether they're still people who hug. "You're soaking." Niamh stepped back. "It's raining." "I noticed." She looked at Rory properly. "You look—" "Don't." "I was going to say well." "You were going to say different." Niamh's mouth did the thing. That half-smile. "Both." Silas appeared at the end of the bar with the quiet timing that Rory had stopped being surprised by. "Friend of yours?" "Apparently." Rory looked at Niamh. "Drink?" They took the corner of the bar, two stools angled toward each other. Niamh ordered whiskey, neat, and Rory finally drank some of her wine. For a moment neither of them spoke, which should have been uncomfortable and wasn't quite, because they'd always had that — the ability to sit in silence without it meaning anything bad. Though Rory wasn't certain, anymore, what it meant. "How long has it been?" Niamh turned her glass in a slow circle on the bar. "Five years. Bit more." "Sophie Doyle's wedding." "You left before the reception." "I had a flight." Rory remembered standing outside the reception venue in Cork, watching Niamh's taxi pull away, thinking she'd text her later. She hadn't. Neither had Niamh. "What are you doing in London?" Rory asked. "I'm based here now. Have been for two years." "Two years." "I know." Niamh didn't look away. "I thought about it. Getting in touch. I just didn't—" She stopped. Picked up her glass and put it down again. "It seemed complicated." "We used to eat cereal out of the same bowl because we couldn't be bothered washing up." "We were nineteen." "We were best friends." The words landed on the bar between them. Niamh's jaw tightened, briefly, and then she nodded. "Yeah. We were." The trumpet on the speakers resolved into something gentler. The couple by the window had stopped arguing and were looking at their phones, each turned slightly away from the other. "What do you do?" Rory asked. "Here." "Compliance. Financial sector." Niamh said it with the flat, practised delivery of someone who'd learned to close that particular door quickly. "It's not interesting. Don't ask." "I wasn't going to." "You were. Your face does the thing." "I don't have a thing." "You have a thing. Your chin lifts about three millimetres when you're interested in something and don't want to seem like it." Niamh finally took a proper sip of her whiskey. "You're doing it right now." Rory put her chin down deliberately. Niamh laughed — a real laugh, short and sudden — and for a moment she looked exactly like herself at twenty, sitting in the kitchen of their student house on Crwys Road, and it was fine. And then the moment passed and she was this new, careful version again, and the distance between the two felt enormous. "Cardiff feels like someone else's life," Niamh said, quieter. "You chose that." "I chose a lot of things." She said it without defensiveness. Just weight. "So did you. You were going to be a barrister." "Plans change." "You're doing deliveries." "Part-time. It's fine." "I'm not judging you, Rory." "You're making a face." "I'm not making—" Niamh stopped. Her shoulder dropped half an inch. "I'm not judging you," she said again, more slowly. "I think I might be judging myself." Silas drifted past, swapped a beermat for a dry one near Niamh's glass, disappeared. He had an extraordinary capacity for being neither present nor absent. "I missed you," Rory said. Niamh was quiet for long enough that the trumpet came back. "I missed you too." She looked down at her glass. "I just didn't know what to do with that."