Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V4MAEJJGGC6KK67VC4YWT

The Wednesday 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, her delivery bag crumpled on the stool beside her, a half-eaten plate of chips going cold. Behind the counter, Silas polished the same tumbler he'd been polishing for five minutes, his hazel eyes tracking the football match on the mounted television with the attention of a man who had no money on the game but nothing better to study. Rory dragged a chip through a smear of vinegar and glanced at the old maps on the wall. Casablanca. Prague. Istanbul. She'd asked him once if the pins marked places he'd actually been. He'd smiled and said they marked places he'd rather forget. She never asked again. The door opened. A gust of November air pushed through the bar, stirring the napkins on the counter. Rory didn't look up. People came and went. That was what doors were for. But Silas stopped polishing. That made her look. The woman in the doorway wore a charcoal wool coat that cost more than Rory's rent. Her hair, once a savage tangle of red curls that she'd pin up with whatever was nearby — pencils, chopsticks, once a plastic straw — was blown straight and copper-blonde, falling like liquid over her shoulders. She carried herself the way expensive coats teach people to carry themselves: upright, contained, as though the cold wouldn't dare follow her inside. Rory's chip hovered halfway to her mouth. Niamh Gallagher scanned the bar with quick, assessing eyes — barrister's eyes, the kind that catalogued a room the way an auctioneer priced furniture — and when they landed on Rory, they stopped. Something collapsed behind them. A wall or a dam or whatever it was she'd built in the years between then and now. "Christ," Niamh said. "Niamh?" The name came out wrong, carrying too much of Cardiff in it, too much of the library basement where they'd studied tort law until three in the morning, too much of that awful Thai place on City Road where the pad see ew tasted like cardboard and they'd eaten it anyway because it was cheap and open late and close to Niamh's flat. Niamh crossed the bar in measured steps. She didn't rush. That was new. The Niamh Gallagher Rory had known rushed everywhere — rushed into rooms, into arguments, into friendships, into love with people who didn't deserve the velocity of her affection. "Rory bloody Carter." She stopped a foot away, and up close the changes multiplied. Her cheekbones were sharper. Not thinner so much as whittled. She wore a thin gold chain with no pendant, and her fingers were bare except for a pale stripe on her left ring finger where something used to live. "Sit down," Rory said, moving the delivery bag. Niamh looked at the bag with its grease stain and the Golden Empress logo, the cartoon dragon holding a wok. She sat without comment, though the comment was there, pressed into the slight thinning of her lips. Silas appeared as if summoned, a trick he had. "What can I get you?" "Whiskey. Neat. Whatever's Irish." Niamh set her clutch on the bar. "Old habit." Silas poured without ceremony, slid the glass across, and retreated to his tumbler. But Rory noticed he didn't retreat far. He had an instinct for conversations worth overhearing, and decades of professional eavesdropping had made the instinct structural. Niamh turned the glass but didn't drink. "I thought you were in — I heard you were—" "London. I'm in London. Obviously." Rory gestured at the bar, the green neon bleeding through the window, the map of Casablanca. "Have been for two years." "Two years." Niamh repeated it like a sum she couldn't balance. "Eva knew?" "Eva knew." A silence fell. Not empty — full, the way a held breath is full. "She didn't tell me." "I asked her not to." Niamh's hand tightened around the glass. She drank, a single clean swallow, and set it down with the precision of someone who'd trained themselves out of slamming things. "Right. Well. That's fair, I suppose. You always were good at clean breaks." "That's generous. I'd have said I was good at running." "Same skill, different branding." The joke landed sideways, half-funny and half-sharp, and Rory let it sit between them because contesting it would mean explaining, and explaining would mean Evan, and Evan was a door she'd locked and bricked over and planted a garden in front of. "You look different," Rory said instead. Niamh touched her hair reflexively. "The salon calls it 'champagne copper.' I call it expensive." "Not the hair. All of it. You." Niamh's fingers returned to the glass, circling the rim. The pale stripe on her ring finger caught the bar's amber light. "People change." "Some more than others." Rory turned on her stool to face her fully. Those blue eyes that friends and enemies alike called unnerving in their directness. "When I left Cardiff, you were wearing Doc Martens and fighting the council over tenant rights. Pro bono, sixty hours a week. You told me once that money was a language spoken by people who had nothing worth saying." "I was twenty-two. Twenty-two-year-olds say magnificent, idiotic things." "You meant it." The silence again. Niamh traced the absent ring with her thumb, a gesture so habitual she probably didn't know she did it. "I got the pupillage at Thornfield Chambers," she said. "The one we both applied for, remember? Three hundred applicants, four spots. I called your mum's house to tell you, and Jennifer said you'd gone. Just — gone. No forwarding address. No number." The guilt of that landed the way it always did: dull and low, a stone dropped in deep water. Rory looked at her chips. They'd gone grey. "I'm sorry." "Don't. I'm not fishing." Niamh flagged Silas for another whiskey. He poured, and this time he lingered, wiping down a perfectly clean section of counter. "Thornfield's commercial division. Mergers. Acquisitions. Last year I billed more hours than anyone in chambers. My supervising tenant said I had the instincts of a surgeon and the hours of a junior doctor, and he meant it as a compliment." "But." Niamh looked at her. "But." She didn't elaborate. She didn't need to. Rory could see it in the careful architecture of her — the pressed coat, the trained hair, the deleted ring — the way you can see the bones of a demolished house in the foundation that remains. Niamh had built herself into something polished and lucrative and completely foreign to the person she'd been, and the construction had cost her things she hadn't budgeted for. "Marcus?" Rory asked softly. "Fourteen months ago. Gone. Amicable, if you're curious, which is the word solicitors use when they mean bloodless." Niamh drank. "He said I'd become someone he didn't recognize, which is a spectacular thing to hear from a man you've shared a bed with for four years. Like being told you've been haunting your own house." "Niamh." "I'm not — I don't need the face, Rory. The sympathetic face. You left. You don't get to look at me like that." The words hit the bar top and rang. Two stools down, a man in a flat cap looked over. Silas interceded with the silent grace of an old professional, refilling the man's pint unasked. The man looked at the pint, forgot what he'd been eavesdropping on, and drank. Rory turned the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist toward herself, pressing her thumb into it the way she did when she needed to think before speaking. "You're right." "I know I'm right." "I should have called." "Yes." "I should have told you I was going. You deserved that." Niamh set both hands flat on the bar, fingers spread, a gesture Rory recognized from a thousand study sessions: Niamh organizing her thoughts. "Do you know what the worst part was? It wasn't that you disappeared. People disappear. We're not children; I understand that people leave. The worst part was that I knew why. I knew about Evan. I saw the bruise on your collarbone at Sioned's wedding, and you told me you'd fallen against the bathroom doorframe, and I let you tell me that. I let you lie to me because the truth would have required me to do something, and I was terrified — terrified — of doing the wrong thing. And then you were gone, and doing anything became impossible." The bar hummed. Someone had put money in the jukebox, and Tom Waits was singing about rain dogs with his gorgeous ruined voice. Rory exhaled. The sound felt like it had been sitting inside her ribcage for three years. "It wasn't yours to fix." "No. But it was mine to witness. I could have at least stood in the room with you and said, I see this. I see what's happening. And I didn't." The confession settled between them like a card placed face-up on a table. Rory stared at the bar's scarred wood, at the rings left by a thousand sweating glasses. Silas had told her once that every stain on the bar was someone's story, and she'd thought that was sentimental for a man who'd spent thirty years lying for a living. Now she thought he might have been right. "You're here," Rory said. "I'm here because I walked into a random bar in Soho because my train home was cancelled and my phone was dead and I wanted a drink. I'm not here through moral courage. I'm here through signal failure on the Great Western Railway." "And yet." Niamh's mouth twitched. The ghost of something Rory recognized — a smile that started in the left corner and spread like a crack in ice. She'd thought that smile was gone. She'd thought a lot of things were gone. "You deliver Chinese food," Niamh said. "Cantonese. Yu-Fei would murder me if she heard you say Chinese. She's from Hong Kong." "You deliver Cantonese food. You live above a bar in Soho. You, Aurora Carter, daughter of Brendan Carter QC, the most terrifyingly articulate man I have ever met." "He still is. I got a letter last month. Three pages, single-spaced. He made a structured argument for why I should retake the bar examinations, complete with footnotes." "And?" "I wrote back and told him I was happy." "Are you?" Rory looked around The Raven's Nest. The maps. The photographs. Silas, who'd stopped pretending not to listen and was leaning against the back counter with his arms crossed, his silver signet ring catching the light. The green neon that bled through the window and painted everything the color of deep water. "I'm not unhappy," she said. "Which is more than I could say for the last two years in Cardiff." Niamh considered this. She'd always had a way of considering things — fully, with her whole face — that made you feel whatever you'd said deserved the weight she was giving it. "I'm not unhappy either," Niamh said. "I'm just not sure I'm anything at all. I'm very good at my job. I'm exceptional, actually. I close deals that make grown men cry with gratitude. And I walk home to an empty flat in Clifton and I eat something that comes in a cardboard sleeve and I think: this is it. This is what I traded the Doc Martens for." "Come back for them." Niamh looked at her. "Not the boots. The rest of it. The part of you that fought for things that didn't bill by the hour." "That's easy to say when you've already jumped." "Jumping was the most terrifying thing I've ever done. The landing hasn't been graceful. My knees are still ringing." Rory pushed the plate of cold chips between them. "But the ground's solid." Niamh stared at the chips. Pale, vinegar-soggy, utterly unrefined. She picked one up and ate it, and something in her face opened — a window in a room that had been sealed too long. "God, those are terrible." "Silas makes them himself. Don't tell him." "I heard that," Silas said without moving. Niamh laughed. The sound was rusty, as though it had been stored in a place that didn't get much use, but it was real, and it filled the space between them in a way that two whiskeys and three years of silence hadn't managed. She reached for another chip.