Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V80CCZK9AVRJ2HBHVD39G

The Tuesday crowd at The Raven's Nest was thin enough that Rory could hear the ice settling in her glass. She sat at the far end of the bar, jacket still damp from the rain, a stack of delivery receipts fanning out beside her elbow. The green neon from the sign outside bled through the window and pooled on the countertop, giving everything a sickly underwater glow. Behind her, the old maps on the walls curled at their edges like they were recoiling from the cigarette smoke of decades past. Silas polished a pint glass with a cloth that had seen better years. He didn't look up when he spoke. "You going to nurse that all night, or should I put a candle in it?" "I'm savoring." "You're brooding. Different animal." He set the glass down and leaned against the back bar, the wood creaking under his weight. His signet ring caught the light as he folded his arms. "What's the damage?" "Nothing. Long shift. Yu-Fei had me running to Hackney twice." "Hackney." He said it the way other people said root canal. "That woman's going to run you into the ground." The door opened. Rory didn't turn — she'd learned that particular discipline from Silas himself, though he'd never said it outright. You pick up habits from people who've spent lifetimes reading rooms. Cold air knifed in with the sound of Frith Street traffic, then the door swung shut and the bar returned to its amber quiet. Footsteps. A woman's heels, uneven on the warped floorboards, the kind of walk that said she wasn't used to the shoes or the neighborhood. Rory tracked the sound to a spot about four stools down, heard the scrape of someone settling in. "Could I get a gin and tonic? Hendrick's, if you have it." Rory's hand stopped halfway to her glass. The voice had a lift to it, a specific music — vowels that started in the chest and rose, the way people from the valleys spoke when they'd spent years sanding down the accent but couldn't quite kill it. She knew that voice. She'd sat next to it in lecture halls, heard it cracking jokes in library stairwells, listened to it go hoarse at rugby matches in the Arms Park cold. She turned. The woman four stools down had auburn hair cut into a sharp bob that framed a face Rory almost didn't recognize. Not because it had aged — it had, the way all faces do, the softness around the jaw firming into something more deliberate — but because of what sat behind the eyes. Megan Rees had always looked like someone about to laugh. The woman at the bar looked like someone who'd forgotten how. Megan noticed her at the same moment. Her lips parted. Her hand, reaching for the drink Silas was already building, froze in the air. "Rory?" "Meg." A silence opened between them like a crack in a wall. Silas glanced from one to the other, set the gin and tonic on the bar with the precision of a man defusing something, and drifted to the far end without a word. His limp was barely perceptible as he went. Megan's mouth worked through several expressions before settling on one that might have been a smile in better lighting. "I don't — what are you doing here?" "I live upstairs." "You live above a bar in Soho." "It has its charms." Megan looked around at the black-and-white photographs, the maps with their faded trade routes, the ceiling stain shaped vaguely like Portugal. Her gaze came back to Rory with something careful in it. Something measured. "You look different." "It's been four years." "Three and a half. I counted." Megan picked up her drink. The ice rattled. "Your mum told my mum you'd moved to London. That's about all anyone got. Like you'd entered witness protection." Rory took a sip of her own drink, let the burn settle, let the silence do its work. She wasn't going to explain. Not the way Megan wanted her to — neatly, chronologically, with the kind of emotional resolution that made for a good story at someone's kitchen table. "I needed a change." "A change." Megan repeated the word like she was testing it for structural integrity. "You were six months from finishing your degree. Your father had already talked to Hargreaves about a training contract. You had that flat with — " She stopped. A flicker crossed her face, quick as a bird's shadow. "With Evan." "I wasn't going to say it." "You were. It's fine." It wasn't fine. Rory felt the old architecture of it shift inside her chest — not the pain itself but the memory of the shape pain had once occupied, like pressing a tongue to the socket where a tooth used to be. Megan rotated her glass a quarter turn. "I called you. After you left. Must have rung twenty times that first week." "I know." "You never picked up." "I know that too." "I thought you were dead, Rory. I actually — for about three days I genuinely thought something had happened to you. I went round to the flat and Evan said you'd gone. Just gone. Packed a bag and left. He had this look on his face like he was the victim in all of it, and I wanted to — " Her jaw tightened. She took a drink. "I should have pushed harder. Before. When things were — I could see it, you know. Toward the end. The way you flinched when your phone buzzed. How you stopped coming out." The words landed in the space between them and stayed there, vibrating faintly. "That wasn't your job, Meg." "No. But it was what friends do, isn't it." Not a question. An indictment — self-directed, worn smooth from years of handling. Rory studied her. The sharp bob. The dark blazer that fit too well to be off the rack. The careful makeup that stopped just short of severe. Megan Rees, who'd once shown up to a Constitutional Law exam in a Stereophonics t-shirt and flip-flops, who'd kept a jar of Nutella in her desk drawer and called it emergency rations. "You look like you're doing well. Professionally." "Hargreaves. Third year associate. Corporate division." Megan's voice flattened out as she said it, the way people's voices do when they're reciting something they've been asked about too many times. "Your father's firm. I took the training contract." "The one he'd arranged for me." "Your name still came up in the interview. Brendan Carter's daughter. They asked me if I knew you. I said we'd studied together. Past tense." She turned on her stool to face Rory fully. Under the bar's low light, the shadows beneath her eyes looked like bruises. "I'm in London for a conference. Three days at a hotel in Mayfair that costs more per night than my first car. I should be at the reception right now. Networking. Shaking hands." "Why aren't you?" "Because I walked past this place and the green light caught my eye and something in my body just said stop." Megan's voice cracked along a fault line Rory hadn't expected. "I'm so tired, Rory. I'm so bloody tired all the time and I don't know when that started." The confession hung in the air like smoke. At the other end of the bar, Silas busied himself with something behind the counter, his back turned, giving them the privacy of a man who understood that some conversations needed room to breathe. Rory looked at her old friend — at the expensive blazer and the careful hair and the dark-ringed eyes — and recognized something she'd seen in her own mirror two years ago. The particular exhaustion of becoming what was expected. Of filling a shape someone else had cut. "When did you last have a day off?" "I don't — I don't remember. March, maybe? I took a Saturday." "A Saturday." "Half a Saturday. I went in after lunch." Rory exhaled through her nose. She reached over and slid the stack of delivery receipts aside, clearing a space on the bar between them. A small gesture, but it mattered — the removal of a barrier, however thin. "You want to hear something ridiculous? I deliver Chinese food. Three nights a week, sometimes four. On a bicycle, in the rain, to people who tip in exact change and complain if the soup's gone cold." Megan blinked. "You're joking." "Golden Empress, Wardour Street. If you've ever ordered the char siu, I might have brought it to your door." A sound escaped Megan's throat — not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, something native to the territory between. "Brendan Carter's daughter delivers Chinese food." "Brendan Carter's daughter does a lot of things Brendan Carter doesn't know about." Rory turned the crescent scar on her left wrist toward the light without thinking about it, an old unconscious habit. "I'm not practicing law. I'm not finishing the degree. I'm not the person you knew, Meg. And I know that's — I know it looks like failure from where you're sitting." "From where I'm sitting, it looks like you can breathe." The words landed differently than Rory expected. She looked at Megan and saw something raw there, something the expensive blazer couldn't cover. Envy, maybe. Or the cousin of envy — the grief of recognizing a freedom you'd traded away before you understood its value. "I miss you," Megan said. "I've missed you this whole time and I've been furious about it. Both things, simultaneously, for three and a half years. Do you know how exhausting that is on top of everything else?" "Yeah. I do." "Because you've felt it too, or because you're being polite?" "When have I ever been polite?" This time the sound Megan made was closer to a laugh. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. She picked up her gin and tonic and took a real drink — not a sip, not a measured taste, but the kind of pull that said the night had shifted into something unplanned. Silas materialized at their end of the bar with the quiet efficiency that had no doubt served him in another life. He set down a small bowl of mixed nuts, refilled Rory's glass without being asked, and paused just long enough to catch Rory's eye. The look he gave her was unreadable to anyone who didn't know him — but Rory did. It said: This one matters. Don't bolt. She gave the barest nod. "I'm sorry I disappeared," Rory said. The words came out without rehearsal, rough-edged, and she let them stand that way. "I couldn't take anyone with me. I could barely take myself." "I know." Megan's voice was quiet. "I know that now. I didn't know it then. Then it just felt like being left." "It was. That's what it was. I left. Everyone." "Including yourself, it sounds like." Rory considered that. The black-and-white photographs on the wall behind Megan showed faces she didn't know — strangers at parties in decades past, mid-laugh, holding drinks, frozen in moments they'd probably forgotten by the next morning. Time did that. Turned everything sepia. Softened the edges until you couldn't remember whether you'd been happy or just young. "I'm building something new," she said. "It's small. It's not impressive. Nobody at Hargreaves would understand it. But it's mine." Megan set her glass down. She looked at Rory with an expression that held the full weight of every unanswered phone call, every birthday message sent into the void, every Friday night at the pub with an empty chair where someone used to sit. Then she reached across the cleared space on the bar and laid her hand palm-up. An offering. A bridge made of five fingers and a history. Rory looked at it. The nails were bitten — chewed ragged, the cuticles torn. The hands of a third-year associate at a prestigious firm. The hands of someone drowning at a respectable pace. She put her hand in Megan's. The touch was cool, brief. Enough. "I'm here until Thursday," Megan said. "I know where to find good Chinese food." The green neon pulsed against the window. Somewhere in the back of the bar, ice shifted in a bucket. Silas had moved off again, a ghost with a limp and a cloth over his shoulder, leaving them to the fragile, terrifying work of two people deciding whether the bridge between who they were and who they'd become could hold any weight at all.