Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TT3WC2DVJTRS3P5H9JBGS

The delivery bag had left a red welt across Rory's shoulder, and she was prodding at it absently when she pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest and let the warmth of the place close around her like a hand. It was a Tuesday, which meant the bar ran quiet — two men nursing pints near the window, a woman typing furiously at a laptop she had no business bringing to a bar. Silas stood behind the counter polishing a glass with the focused patience of a man who polished glasses the way others meditated, his signet ring catching the low amber light each time his hand turned. He glanced at her, read whatever he always read in her face, and had a glass of red waiting on the bar before she'd fully unwound her scarf. "Cheung run you ragged?" he asked. "Leicester Square on a Tuesday evening." She slid onto the stool and wrapped both hands around the stem of the glass. "I don't want to talk about it." He made a noise that was not quite agreement and not quite sympathy, and moved to the far end of the bar to attend to the two men with pints. Rory sat with her wine and the old maps on the walls and the particular silence of a place that knew how to hold its quiet, and she was already beginning to feel her shoulders unhook from somewhere near her ears. She was staring at a black-and-white photograph of what looked like the Seine — or possibly the Thames; the image was grainy enough to be either — when the door opened and the cold air came in with it, and then a voice said her name. Not Rory. Aurora. Nobody in London called her Aurora. She turned on the stool. Sian Hughes stood in the doorway with her coat still open and her hair longer than Rory remembered, darker too, the old chestnut dye grown out to reveal something closer to brown. She looked exactly like herself and entirely unlike herself, which was a thing Rory hadn't thought possible until she was looking at it. The same wide eyes, the same slight overbite, the same way she held her bag strap in both hands when she was uncertain. But she was wearing a blazer over a blouse that had clearly come from somewhere sensible and expensive, and there were lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there three years ago. Maybe four. Rory found she couldn't quite pin down when she'd last seen her. "Christ," Sian said. "It really is you." "Sian." Rory said it carefully, the way you say a word you haven't spoken aloud in long enough that it's stopped sounding like itself. She got off the stool. They met in the middle of the room and embraced the way people do when they haven't yet worked out how glad they are to see each other — briefly, with a slight excess of arm-patting. "What are you doing here?" Rory asked. "I'm in London for work. Seminar thing. A colleague brought me out for drinks and I got separated from the group somewhere around—" Sian looked behind her, as if expecting the group to materialise. "I don't actually know where I am." "Soho." "Right." She looked around at the maps and photographs and the green wash of neon leaking through the window from outside. "Is this your local?" "Sort of. I live upstairs." Sian's eyebrows rose. "You live above a bar." "It seemed like a good idea at the time," Rory said, which was the same thing she said when anyone asked about it, and which was not entirely true and not entirely false. They sat. Silas appeared, unhurried and observant, and Sian ordered a gin and tonic with the quick confidence of someone who orders the same thing everywhere without having to think about it. Rory watched her and tried to remember if Sian had always been like that, or if it was new. "So," Sian said, when Silas had moved away. "You look good. Different, but good." "Different how?" "I don't know. Looser, maybe." Sian smiled. It didn't quite reach where smiles usually reached. "You used to look like you were waiting for something bad to happen." Rory said nothing. She turned her wine glass a quarter turn. "How long have you been in London?" Sian asked. "Coming up on two years." "God." Sian shook her head. "And you just — went. Didn't you. No overlap, no warning. One week you were in Cardiff and then you just weren't." She said it lightly, the way people say things they've rehearsed enough that they no longer sound rehearsed, but Rory had been good at reading rooms long before Silas had started teaching her to be better, and she caught the edge underneath it. "I know," Rory said. "I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye properly." "Properly." Sian laughed, short and dry. "You didn't say goodbye at all. Your number changed. Eva wouldn't tell me anything — said it wasn't her story to tell." "It wasn't." "I know that." A pause. "I know that, Aurora. I'm not — I'm not angry about it. I was, for a bit. But I understand it now." She wrapped both hands around her glass, the same gesture she'd made with the bag strap in the doorway. "I just wish you'd trusted me." It landed without theatrics, which made it land harder. Rory looked at the crescent scar on her left wrist, the faint pale curve of it, and said: "It wasn't about trust. I barely trusted myself back then." Sian was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bus groaned past on the street, and one of the men by the window said something that made the other one laugh. "He's still in Cardiff," Sian said, which was technically a non sequitur and which both of them understood perfectly. "Evan. He's with someone. They got engaged last spring, I think." "Right." The word came out very flat. "I'm not telling you to upset you. I thought you might — I don't know. Want to know." "I don't," Rory said. Then: "But thank you." The silence between them rearranged itself into something slightly easier. Sian took a long sip of her gin and Rory watched the green neon outside pulse against the window glass and thought about how strange it was to sit beside someone who had known you before you were yourself, before you'd burned the version of yourself that had needed burning. "You're doing well," Rory said, because it seemed true and because she wanted to give Sian something. "Cardiff suits you?" Something crossed Sian's face. Quick, and then carefully shut. "Sure," she said. "I made partner last year. Cian and I bought a place in Pontcanna." She said it the way you recite proven facts — not proudly, not sadly, just with the exhaustion of having said them many times. "It's very nice. Lovely street." "That's brilliant, Sian." "It is." She picked at the edge of a cardboard coaster. "It really is. I just sometimes think—" She stopped. Started again. "Do you remember what we used to say? Third year, when we'd have a bottle of wine on the roof of your halls?" "That we'd be gone by twenty-five." Rory said it quietly. "Both of us. Somewhere." "Somewhere," Sian repeated, with something in the word that could have been gentle mockery and could have been grief. "You went to somewhere. I—" She lifted her hands and let them fall. "I went to a very nice house in Pontcanna." "You love Cian," Rory said. "I do." No hesitation there, at least. "I really, genuinely do. It's not—" She seemed to search for the right shape of it. "It's not that I made the wrong choice. I just can't always tell if I made a choice at all. You know? Or if I just — let things happen, and then one day they were my life." She said it looking at the bar, not at Rory. Rory didn't answer. She had learned, in the last two years, that some things didn't want answering. Silas came back to wipe down the far end of the bar, moving quietly the way he always moved, as though he was somewhere else and just visiting his own body. He caught Rory's eye briefly and she gave the smallest shake of her head, and he moved on. "Is that him?" Sian murmured. "The landlord?" "The barman. Landlord too." "He looks like someone who knows too much about everybody." "He does, a bit." Rory smiled. "He's good people." Sian looked at her — really looked, the way she hadn't quite managed to do since she'd sat down. "You seem happy," she said. Not brightly. Honestly, with a care in it that made Rory's chest do something complicated. "Like, actually. Not performing it." "I'm working on it." Rory turned the wine glass again. "Some days more than others. The delivery job is genuinely terrible." "But?" "But." She thought about the flat upstairs, the slant of morning light through the single east-facing window, the way Silas knocked twice on the ceiling with a broom handle when he thought she'd slept in past noon. The city that had asked nothing of her except that she show up to it. "But other things aren't." Sian nodded slowly. Outside, the group she'd been separated from had apparently found the street — Rory could hear voices, someone calling a name that might have been Sian's. Sian heard it too and went still, the way people go still when they're briefly between two worlds. "You should go," Rory said. "I should." Sian didn't move. Then she pulled a business card from her blazer pocket — actual card, heavy stock, very professional — and slid it across the bar. "If you ever come back to Cardiff. Or if I'm in London again. I don't want another four years." Rory picked it up. Sian Hughes. A firm she didn't recognise. A Cardiff number. "I won't disappear again," Rory said, and meant it in the way you mean things that are aspirations dressed as promises, which is still a kind of meaning. Sian slid off her stool and buttoned her coat. She looked, for just a moment, like the girl she'd been on the roof with a bottle of Malbec, twenty-one and furious with potential, certain the world was about to offer her something enormous. The moment passed and she was a partner at a firm in Pontcanna again, and Rory wasn't sure whether to be sad about that or whether sadness was even the right instrument. "Take care of yourself," Sian said. "You too." She left, and the door let the cold in and then closed against it. Rory sat with the business card between her fingers until Silas drifted back to her end of the bar, unhurried, and rested his forearms on the counter. "Old friend," she said. It wasn't a question. "Very." She set the card down. "We used to be the same, more or less. I think we both assumed we always would be." Silas considered this with the gravity he brought to most things. "People change," he said finally. "Doesn't mean anybody made a wrong turn." "No," she agreed. "Just different turns." He poured her a fraction more wine without asking and went back to his polishing, and Rory sat with the green neon and the maps and the long, particular weight of the night, and tried to decide if what she felt was guilt or love or simply the ache of having once known someone very well, and now knowing them only partially, like a word in a language you're beginning to forget.