Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HMR6QN0WR07DZ50RNH9

The Raven's Nest was quiet on Thursday evenings. That was why Rory liked them. She sat at the far end of the bar with a glass of red wine she hadn't touched in twenty minutes, a battered paperback open in front of her that she hadn't been reading for longer than that. The place had a particular kind of stillness on slow nights — the old maps on the walls seemed to breathe, the black-and-white faces in the photographs watching the room with their flat, patient eyes. Somewhere behind the bar, Silas moved glasses from one shelf to another with the deliberate economy of a man who had learned long ago that unnecessary motion was a form of confession. The green neon outside bled through the windows and laid itself across the floorboards in thin strips. The door opened and Rory didn't look up. She turned a page she hadn't read. "Rory." The voice hit her somewhere behind the sternum. She knew it before she placed it — the way you know a song from three notes, before the melody arrives and confirms what you'd already braced for. She looked up. The woman standing inside the entrance was tallish, wearing a dark wool coat that looked expensive and recently pressed. Her hair was different — shorter, lighter, the natural brown replaced with something carefully maintained and professionally blonde. She stood the way people stand when they've spent years learning to take up space, shoulders squared, chin level, one hand still resting on the door's edge as if she hadn't yet committed to coming inside. "Meg." Rory's voice came out even. She hadn't planned for it to, but there it was. Meg Calloway stepped in and let the door swing shut behind her. Her eyes swept the bar the way a person's eyes sweep a room when they're deciding whether to stay, then settled back on Rory with an expression that was almost a smile but not quite there yet. "God." She exhaled the word. "I wasn't sure it was you. The hair." Rory touched the end of her shoulder-length black hair briefly, self-consciously, then stopped herself. "Same hair." "You used to wear it longer." Meg came forward, slow, like she was giving Rory time to object. She pulled out the stool two down from Rory's and sat sideways on it, coat still buttoned. "What are you doing in Soho?" "I live here." That landed somewhere on Meg's face that wasn't quite surprise. Her mouth shifted. "Here? In Soho?" "Above this bar, actually." Meg looked up, as if she could see through the ceiling. Then she looked at Silas, who was regarding them both with the mild, unbothered attention of a man who had witnessed considerably stranger reunions in this room. "Could I get a gin and tonic, please. Whatever you think." Silas set down his cloth and moved without comment. Rory closed her book. There didn't seem to be any point pretending anymore. "You look well," she said. "I look tired." Meg said it without bitterness, just fact. "I've just come from a dinner in Mayfair that lasted three hours longer than any dinner should. Client thing." She unbuttoned her coat finally, folded it over the back of the stool beside her. Underneath she wore a silk blouse in deep burgundy, pearls at the collar. "You look — different. I don't mean that badly." "I know." Silas placed the gin and tonic on the bar and withdrew. Meg wrapped both hands around the glass without drinking. "How long have you been in London?" "Two years, almost." "I've been here four." She looked at Rory directly then. "We've been in the same city for two years." "Yes." A beat passed between them where neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that two years was a very long time and London was not actually that large and neither of them had made any effort. "I heard about Evan," Meg said. Rory picked up her wine glass and drank. "Right." "I should have — I should have called. When I heard." Meg's fingers tightened around her glass. "I kept thinking I would. I'd pick up my phone and then I'd—" She shook her head. "I don't have a good reason. I want you to know I know I don't have a good reason." "It was a long time ago." "It wasn't, though. Not really." Meg finally drank, a long swallow, then set the glass down and looked at the bar's surface. "We were best friends for eleven years, Rory. Cardiff, university, all of it. And then I just — I chose wrong." Rory said nothing for a moment. The neon outside shifted, the green light moving as someone passed the window. "You believed him," she said. "He was very convincing." "I believed him because it was easier to believe him." Meg said it quietly, with the flat precision of something rehearsed not for an audience but for herself, in the dark, alone. "Because if I believed you, then I had to do something about it. And I was twenty-three and I didn't know how to do anything about anything." The honesty of it settled in the air between them. Rory turned the wineglass by its stem, a slow rotation. There was something she'd carried for a long time that had the shape of anger but had gone cool and dense, like metal left somewhere and forgotten. Not forgiveness. Not quite its opposite either. Something that had simply stopped burning without ever being extinguished. "Who told you about Evan? About me leaving?" "Eva. She rang me about a year after. She wasn't angry, which somehow made it worse." Meg smiled faintly and without warmth. "She just said you were all right. Thought I'd want to know." "That sounds like Eva." "Yes." Meg looked at her. "Are you? All right?" Rory considered lying, considered the briefer, more comfortable shape of fine, yes, then decided against it. "Better than I was. It took a while to get here. But yes." Meg nodded slowly, like she was filing that away somewhere careful. "You're in law?" Rory asked. "The client dinners." "Mergers and acquisitions." Meg looked down at her pearl collar with a complicated expression, half rueful, half something else. "Not exactly what I thought I'd be doing." "What did you think you'd be doing?" Meg laughed, one short, genuine sound, the first real one. "I don't even remember. Something that mattered, I suppose. You know how you are at twenty, when you're certain everything you do will matter enormously."