Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V0SJGRDK5M497KMSBWNS2

The Tuesday crowd at The Raven's Nest was thin enough that Rory could hear the ice settle in her glass. She sat at the far end of the bar, still wearing the Golden Empress windbreaker with the embroidered dragon on the back, her helmet tucked beneath her stool. The last delivery had taken her through Covent Garden in the rain, and her black hair clung to her neck in damp ropes. She smelled of sesame oil and wet pavement. Silas had poured her a whiskey without asking, the way he always did on nights she came in looking like something the city had chewed on, and she'd nodded her thanks and wrapped both hands around the glass as if it might warm the cold that had settled somewhere deeper than her skin. The bar's green neon sign threw a faint emerald cast through the front window, touching the old maps on the walls with a sickly glow. A couple murmured to each other in the corner booth beneath a black-and-white photograph of the Thames at low tide. Silas stood behind the bar, polishing a glass with the unhurried precision of a man who had spent decades making patience look like a vocation. His silver signet ring caught the low light each time his hand turned. He didn't talk when she didn't want talking. That was one of the things she paid him rent for, she sometimes thought—not just the flat upstairs, but the quality of his silence. She was watching the whiskey amber itself in the dim light when the door opened and brought with it a gust of November air and a woman in a charcoal wool coat that cost more than Rory's monthly take-home. The woman paused in the doorway the way people did when they'd wandered into the wrong place and were deciding whether politeness required them to stay for one drink. Her hair was shorter than Rory remembered—cropped close on the sides, swept back on top in a way that looked architectural, deliberate—and she'd lost weight in her face, sharpening the cheekbones that had always been there but hidden beneath the softness of twenty-one. She wore small gold earrings. Her handbag alone could have been a month's rent. Rory didn't recognize her at first. Or rather, she recognized something—the angle of the jaw, the way the woman held her shoulders slightly forward as if bracing for a headwind—without being able to name it. Then the woman turned her head, scanning the bar, and their eyes met, and five years collapsed like a telescope. Megan Harries. Meggie. Who'd sat next to her in Constitutional Law for two semesters. Who'd lent her notes when Rory couldn't be bothered to attend lectures. Who'd held her hair back outside the Angel Hotel after too much cider on her twenty-first birthday. Who'd texted her, once, after everything with Evan, a careful message Rory had read seventeen times and never answered. The recognition moved through Megan's face like weather—surprise, then something softer, then a quick involuntary tightening around the mouth that could have been joy or could have been the effort of assembling a response to something she hadn't prepared for. "Rory?" Her voice hadn't changed. Still that particular Valleys lilt, the one she'd spent their first year trying to sand down and their second year defiantly reclaiming. Rory felt it land somewhere behind her sternum. "Meggie." Megan crossed the room. Up close, the changes multiplied—the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, the tasteful watch, the way she held herself like someone accustomed to being observed and evaluated. She'd become the thing they'd both been training to become, Rory thought. She'd finished the race Rory had abandoned at the halfway mark. "I can't—what are you—you're in London?" Megan's hands moved as if she might reach for a hug, then didn't, then settled on the back of the adjacent barstool. "Can I sit?" "Free country." Rory heard how it sounded and softened. "Yeah. Sit. Please." Megan sat. She placed her handbag on the bar with the careful attention of someone who had learned to value her possessions precisely. Silas materialized in front of her without seeming to move—he had that trick, appearing only when needed, like good intelligence. "What can I get you?" "Do you have a Sancerre?" Silas's expression didn't change, but Rory caught the microscopic shift in his hazel eyes that meant he was entertained. "We have a Pinot Grigio that won't offend you." "That's fine. Thank you." He poured it and retreated to the far end of the bar, where he resumed his communion with the glassware. Rory watched Megan take a sip and set the glass down with the precise movement of someone who'd spent years in rooms where the wrong gesture could lose a client. "You're a solicitor," Rory said. It wasn't a guess. Megan blinked. "Barrister, actually. How did you—" "You hold your wine glass like you're about to cross-examine it." A laugh broke through—sudden, unguarded, belonging entirely to the girl Rory had known and not at all to the woman sitting beside her. It lasted two seconds, maybe three, and then Megan caught it and tucked it away again. "Lincoln's Inn. Third year of tenancy. Commercial and chancery work, mostly." She recited it like a curriculum vitae, then seemed to hear herself and stopped. "God, listen to me. That's not—" She turned on her stool to face Rory fully. "How are you? Where have you been? I tried to—after you left Cardiff, nobody knew where you'd gone. Your mum wouldn't say. Eva said London, but that's all she'd give me." "Eva's protective." "Eva told me to go fuck myself, actually. Her exact words." "That sounds more accurate." The silence that followed had texture. Rory could feel Megan deciding how close to the truth she was willing to get, how much of the careful architecture of politeness she'd built could survive actual honesty. The couple in the corner booth got up and left, and the door sighed shut behind them, and the bar was suddenly smaller. "I live upstairs," Rory said, because someone had to say something. "I deliver food for a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. Sometimes I pick up copyediting work online." She gestured vaguely at the windbreaker, the helmet, the sum total of her visible life. "That's the update." Megan was quiet for a long moment. Rory watched her struggle with it—not the facts themselves, but what to do with her face while she absorbed them. It was a specific kind of pity, the kind worn by people who had taken the safe path and found someone who hadn't, and Rory felt the old familiar heat rise beneath her breastbone. "Don't," she said. "I wasn't—" "You were. It's fine. Just don't." Megan wrapped her fingers around the stem of her glass and studied the pale wine as if it might yield a procedural solution. "I wasn't going to say anything about—I just missed you, Rory. That's all I was going to say." The sincerity of it was worse than the pity would have been. Rory took a drink and let the whiskey burn a clean line through the tightness in her throat. On the wall behind Megan's head, one of Silas's old maps showed the Baltic Sea in inks that had faded from black to a tired sepia. Someone had drawn a small X near Tallinn. She had never asked Silas about the maps. She suspected the answers would come with obligations. "I got your text," Rory said. "After I left." "I know." "I should have answered." "I know that too." Megan's voice was steady, but her right hand had moved to her left wrist—an old habit, a self-soothing gesture Rory recognized from exam season, from late nights in the library, from the morning Megan had called her father and told him she was changing her dissertation topic and listened to him shout for eleven minutes without once interrupting. Rory remembered counting the minutes on the clock above the library doors. "You look good, Meggie. You look like you made it." "Do I." It wasn't a question. Megan looked at her wine, then at the black-and-white photographs, then at the green neon bleeding through the window glass. "I was supposed to meet someone here tonight. A colleague. He recommended the place—said it was discreet." "It is that." "He's not coming. Texted twenty minutes ago." She smiled, and it didn't reach whatever part of her face smiles were supposed to reach. "I almost didn't come in. And then I thought, well, I've already walked three blocks in these shoes, and I could use a drink." "Lucky coincidence." "Is it?" Megan met her eyes. "You believe in those?" "I believe in uncomfortable ones." Another silence. Silas had moved to the far end of the bar, where he was doing something with a ledger and a pencil. His slight limp was more pronounced at the end of long nights—Rory had learned to read his pain the way she read weather, by small signs and shifts. He didn't look up. He was giving them room. "I think about it sometimes," Megan said carefully. "What would have happened if you'd stayed. Finished your degree. Joined a chambers. We talked about it—do you remember? Sharing a flat, doing pupillage together, being the Carter-and-Harries terror of the Welsh legal circuit." "I remember." "It was a good plan." "It was your plan, Meggie. I just hadn't figured out how to tell you it wasn't mine." The words landed with more weight than Rory had intended, and she saw Megan absorb the impact—the flinch, quickly mastered. The gold earrings caught light. The watch ticked on her wrist. Everything about her was measured, calibrated, held in place by invisible scaffolding, and Rory wanted very badly to take it back, and also she didn't. "I wasn't ready," Rory said, more gently. "For any of it. The law, Cardiff, the life that was coming. I wasn't—" She turned the whiskey glass in her hands and watched the liquid climb the sides. "I needed to not be the person everyone expected." "And are you? Not that person?" Rory looked down at herself—the cheap windbreaker, the chapped hands, the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist catching the bar light. She thought of the flat upstairs with its sloping floors and radiator that clanked like a prisoner signaling through pipes. She thought of Yu-Fei pressing extra spring rolls into her bag at the end of a shift, and Eva's voice on the phone every Sunday evening like clockwork, and the particular quality of silence that Silas offered as if it were a sacrament. "I don't know who I am yet," she said. "But at least I stopped pretending I knew." Megan was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice had shed something—some layer of professional composure, some barrister's armor—and what remained was rawer than Rory expected. "I envy that." "Don't. It's not as romantic as it sounds." "I didn't say romantic. I said I envy it." Megan took a longer drink of her wine than the glass warranted. "Do you know what I do, Rory? I sit in rooms and I argue about the precise meaning of contractual subclauses, and I am very, very good at it, and at the end of the day I go home to a flat in Islington that I can technically afford but that I never have time to actually live in, and I open a bottle of wine that I can tell you the provenance of but that I can't taste anymore. Not really." She set the glass down. Her hand was trembling, faintly, the way hands do when the body knows something the mind hasn't admitted. "You ran, and I stayed, and I'm not sure which of us made the braver choice." "There wasn't a brave choice. There was just the choice I could survive." Megan closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were bright, and not from the neon. "I'm sorry I didn't come after you. When you left. Your mum rang me, did you know that? She said you'd gone, and she didn't know where, and could I—and I didn't. I told myself you needed space. But the truth is I was angry. I was angry that you left without saying anything, and I turned the anger into distance, and then the distance became the kind you can't just walk back across." The confession hung in the air between them, occupying the space where years should have been. Rory felt the weight of it settle into her chest beside the older, heavier weight she carried—the accumulated mass of all the people she'd left without explanations, the doors she'd closed from the outside. "I know," Rory said. "I know you were angry. You had every right." "I didn't want rights. I wanted my friend." Rory's throat closed. She reached for her glass and found it empty. Before she could signal, Silas appeared with the bottle and poured two fingers, then moved away again with the quiet economy of a man who understood that some silences needed tending. "I'm here now," Rory said. It was insufficient. She knew it was insufficient. But it was what she had, and she offered it with both hands open. Megan looked at her for a long time—really looked, the way she might examine a contract for hidden provisions. Then she reached into her handbag, produced a business card, and slid it across the bar. The card was heavy stock, cream-colored, embossed. MEGAN HARRIES, BARRISTER, with a Lincoln's Inn address and a phone number in a typeface that projected solidity and permanence. Rory picked it up and turned it over. The back was blank. "My mobile's the second number," Megan said. "If you wanted to—only if you wanted to." Rory ran her thumb across the embossed letters. She thought about all the messages she hadn't returned, all the bridges she'd burned or simply let rot from neglect. She thought about the girl who'd held her hair outside the Angel Hotel, who'd sat through every tortured essay draft, who'd texted her once when it mattered most and received nothing back. She slid the card into the pocket of her windbreaker, next to a crumpled receipt from the Golden Empress. "I'll call," she said. "You don't have to—" "I'll call, Meggie." Something shifted in Megan's face—not quite belief, but the willingness to make room for it. She finished her wine and placed a twenty-pound note on the bar, though the drink couldn't have been more than seven. Silas didn't comment. Megan stood and buttoned her coat with the precision of someone reassembling herself. She hesitated, then leaned forward and pressed her lips briefly to the top of Rory's damp hair. She smelled of something expensive and floral, underlaid with the faint mineral tang of rain. "It's good to see you," she said. "Even like this. Even here." "Even here," Rory repeated, and didn't know whether to be wounded or grateful, so she chose grateful and held on to it. She watched Megan walk to the door, watched her pause with one hand on the frame, watched her not look back. The door opened. The November night swallowed her, and the green neon sign buzzed faintly in the silence she left behind. Silas appeared at Rory's elbow. He collected Megan's glass, pocketed the twenty without counting the change, and stood there for a moment, his hazel eyes resting on Rory's face with an expression she couldn't read and didn't try to. "Old friend?" he asked. "Once." He nodded, as if that single word contained everything he needed, and limped back to his ledger, and left her alone with her whiskey and the faint ghost of expensive perfume and the business card in her pocket that felt, against all reason, like something she might not throw away.