Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8TTC9NNTP6M580E84YS9T8

The green neon sign bled through the rain-streaked window of the cab, staining the leather seat and Rory's hands the colour of something unwell. She paid the driver without counting the change, pulled her jacket tighter, and pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest because it was the nearest warm thing she could find and her feet were wet and she had stopped caring, somewhere between Paddington and Soho, what kind of place she ended up in. Inside, the bar was the sort of dim that felt deliberate. Old maps covered the walls in overlapping layers — the Thames estuary, the Balkans, the coastline of somewhere she didn't recognise — and between them hung black-and-white photographs in mismatched frames: faces without names, cities without dates. A handful of people occupied the far tables. Nobody looked up when she came in. She took a stool at the bar and set her bag down on the one beside it, a proprietary gesture she'd learned in university, back when she'd still been the kind of person who went to bars with other people. The bartender had his back to her, reaching for something on the top shelf, and she noticed the breadth of his shoulders, the grey threading through auburn hair, the unhurried economy of his movements. "Whiskey," she said. "Whatever's open." He turned around. The glass he'd been reaching for stayed where it was. She knew his face in the way you know the face of a photograph you've studied without ever meaning to — not in the forefront of the mind but somewhere deeper, in the place that catalogs things you've decided you no longer need. Older, yes. The beard was new, trimmed close against a jaw she remembered as clean-shaven. The lines around his eyes had deepened into something more settled, less taut. But the hazel eyes were the same, and the silver signet ring on his right hand caught the light exactly as it always had, and her chest did something complicated that she had no interest in examining. "Rory," he said. Not a question. Not quite surprise. More like a word he'd been keeping somewhere, taken out now and held up to the light. "Silas." She heard her own voice land flat, careful as a foot testing ice. "You own this place." "For six years." He reached for a glass — a different one, a tumbler — and poured without asking her to specify. Proper whiskey, she noticed. Not the cheap stuff. "Eva didn't mention you were in London." Eva. Of course he knew Eva. Eva knew everyone eventually; it was her particular talent. "She wouldn't have thought to." Rory wrapped both hands around the glass, not drinking yet, just holding the warmth. "I only arrived a few months ago." Silas leaned against the back counter, arms folded, and looked at her. Not the kind of looking that makes a person feel examined — she'd known enough of that — but the kind that takes inventory without judgment, that simply notes what is and what isn't. She'd forgotten he could do that. She'd forgotten a lot of things about him, mostly because forgetting had been the easier choice. "You look tired," he said. "Thank you, Silas, you look tremendously well yourself." She drank. The whiskey was good, smoky and patient. "How's your knee?" Something shifted in his expression. Amusement, maybe, or its older cousin. "Same as it was." He paused. "How's your father?" There it was. Rory set the glass down on a beermat advertising something she'd never heard of. Through the window behind Silas, the neon sign threw its green light against the rain. She watched a droplet travel down the glass pane — slow, then sudden — and thought about all the ways she could answer that question and all the ways she wouldn't. "Fine," she said. "Still taking cases. Still very certain about everything." "He always was." "You'd know better than most." Neither of them said anything for a moment. The murmur of the far tables filled the space, someone laughing at something, a chair scraping back against the floor. She had been sixteen the first time she'd met Silas Blackwood, at one of her father's dinner parties in the tall house in Cardiff — the kind of evening where the wine was good and the conversation was deliberately imprecise, where men in good suits talked around the edges of things they were not going to name. She had come downstairs in her school jumper, ostensibly for water, and found this man standing alone in the hallway looking at the framed map of Ireland her mother had hung there, the one Ellis had painted in watercolour in 1987. He hadn't startled when she appeared. He'd just looked at her with those measuring hazel eyes and said, you have your father's mouth, and she'd said, I know, everyone says so, and he'd said, they mean it as a compliment, and something in the way he said it made her understand that he didn't. She'd thought about that exchange more than was reasonable, over the years. She'd thought about it in lecture halls and in the flat she'd shared with Evan and on the train out of Cardiff with one bag and her phone switched off. "I left Pre-Law," she said. It came out of nowhere, or from somewhere she hadn't been watching. "In case Eva didn't tell you that either." "She didn't." He picked up a cloth and wiped down the stretch of bar beside her, methodical. "When?" "Two years ago. Officially. I'd already stopped going in properly by the end of first year." She traced a finger along the rim of her glass. "My father doesn't know I'm in London. He thinks I'm staying with Eva in Pontypridd, taking time off. Regrouping." "Are you?" "I'm sitting in a bar at ten o'clock on a Thursday in November." She looked up at him. "What do you think?" His expression didn't change but something behind it did, something quiet and weighted, and she felt the old instinct rise — to deflect, to make a joke of herself before someone else could, to pull the conversation onto firmer ground. She resisted it. She was tired of firmer ground. "There was someone," she said. "In Cardiff. That's the short version." She paused. "The long version isn't very interesting." "You don't have to—" "I know I don't." She turned the glass a quarter turn. "I'm just explaining. Why I left. Why I'm here." Silas was quiet for a moment. He reached under the bar without looking and produced a second glass, poured himself two fingers of the same whiskey. He didn't drink it immediately; he just let it sit there, present, like an acknowledgement of something. "Prague," she said. "Is that why you retired? Eva mentioned, once. She said you'd been hurt." He touched the back of his left knee with two fingers, absently, not quite aware he was doing it. "Among other reasons." "I always thought—" She stopped herself. "What?" The question was gentle. That was the thing about Silas that she'd carried without knowing she was carrying it — he asked questions gently when he could have done otherwise. Her father asked questions like a cross-examination. Evan had asked questions that weren't really questions. But Silas had this quality of patience that made you feel your answer had space to breathe. "I always thought you'd do it forever," she said. "Whatever it was you actually did. It seemed like—" she searched for the word "—like it was the only thing that fit you." He looked down at the signet ring on his right hand, turned it once around his finger. "Things stop fitting," he said. "If you wear them long enough." He picked up his glass and raised it slightly, a gesture more acknowledgment than toast. "And sometimes you find things you didn't know would fit until they did." She thought about the flat upstairs, which she hadn't yet seen, hadn't yet imagined herself in. She thought about Cardiff — her mother's garden in October, the smell of old books in her father's study, the particular quality of the light on the Taff before the storm came in. She thought about herself at sixteen on a staircase, reading a man she hadn't understood. She drank. "I might need a job," she said. "Delivery work, maybe. Something that keeps me moving." He didn't smile exactly, but the lines around his eyes changed in a way that amounted to the same thing. "I might know someone." Outside, the rain had begun to ease. The green neon sign pulsed against the window, steady and dim and persistent. One of the photographs on the wall — she could see it from the corner of her eye — showed two figures standing in front of what looked like a Prague street in winter, both of them half-turned away from the camera, faces unclear. She didn't ask about it. Some things you leave where they are.