Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8V8HNW77JWB1CXXE2JK2KJ

The Raven's Nest emptied early on Tuesdays. By nine, only a few regulars occupied the far end of the bar — a retired postman who nursed a Guinness like it was a project, and a woman in her fifties who always ordered gin and tonic and never spoke to anyone. The old maps on the walls caught the low amber light and made the room feel further from the city than it was. Rory sat on a stool near the taps with her jacket still on and her delivery bag slumped against the bar like it had given up, the same way she felt. Silas set a glass of red in front of her without being asked. He'd taken one look at her when she came in and said nothing, which was its own kind of language. "Ta." She wrapped both hands around the stem and stared into the middle distance, turning the stem slowly. He moved off to wipe down the other end of the bar. The door opened behind her and let in a cold gust that smelled of rain. She didn't look up until she heard it. A laugh — a sharp, bright laugh, cut off almost immediately, as though the person thought better of it. A laugh she hadn't heard in four years but could have picked out of a crowd of thousands. Megan Davies stood just inside the doorway, her hand still on the door handle, scanning the room with the efficient squint of someone who'd walked into the wrong place and was sizing up how wrong. She wore a charcoal coat that fitted her like it had been cut for her body specifically. Her hair, which Rory remembered as a riotous dark red that she'd always been fighting with clips and scarves, was now smoothed back into something sleek and professional. She looked like a different person wearing a familiar face. Their eyes met. "No." Megan's hand dropped from the door. "Rory?" Rory set down her wine. "Meg." For a moment neither of them moved. Then Megan crossed the room in quick steps and pulled her off the stool into a hug that was fiercer than Rory expected, the kind of hug that said something words weren't ready to say. Rory's arms went around her. She smelled different too — cedar and something dry and expensive, not the patchouli oil she used to buy from the market on City Road. "What are you doing here?" Megan pulled back and looked at her, both hands still gripping Rory's arms. Her eyes were moving over her face the way they used to before exams, cataloguing. "I live here. Sort of." Rory tilted her head toward the ceiling, meaning upstairs. "You?" "Client dinner on Dean Street. Client cancelled, I wandered, I found this." She glanced around at the maps, the photographs, the postman with his Guinness. "It looks like the inside of someone's eccentric grandfather's head." "That's fairly accurate, yeah." Silas appeared. Megan ordered a Sauvignon Blanc with the easy authority of someone who made requests all day, and they settled onto the stools. Rory pulled her delivery bag off the bar and tucked it under her feet. Not quick enough. "Is that a thermal bag?" Megan's eyes followed it down. "Like a delivery—" "Yeah." Rory picked up her wine. "I do deliveries. For a restaurant." Megan absorbed that. Her expression didn't shift dramatically — Rory had to give her that — but something in her jaw softened, and that was almost worse. "Okay," she said. "Don't." "I'm not doing anything." "You've got your empathy face on. I recognise it." Megan laughed, and this time she let it run its course. It was the same laugh as before, whatever else had changed. Silas brought her wine and disappeared again with the practised discretion of a man who understood when a room needed space. They talked around it for a while, the way you do. Megan was at Clifford Chance now, commercial litigation, had been since she'd finished her training contract. She lived in Canary Wharf in a flat that she described as "aggressively sensible." Her mother had got remarried — someone from Bridgend, retired teacher, Megan thought her mother deserved it. Rory listened and nodded and asked the right questions, and it was comfortable in the way that old friendships can be comfortable even after the years have done their work. Then Megan turned her wine glass in a slow circle and said, "I looked for you. After you left. For a bit." "I know. Eva told me." "I didn't know if you—" She stopped. "I didn't know if something had happened." "Something had happened." Megan looked at her. "Evan." It wasn't a question. Rory supposed it had always been obvious to people on the outside, the way those things are. She'd been the last to see the shape of it clearly. "Yeah," she said. Megan nodded slowly. "I should have said something. When it was—I could tell something was—" "We were twenty-one." Rory turned her glass. "Nobody knows what they're looking at when they're twenty-one." "I knew enough to know something was wrong and I didn't say it because he was your boyfriend and I thought it wasn't my place and those are the kinds of calculations I'll be making for the rest of my life." The postman at the end of the bar set down his pint. Someone somewhere put music on low — something Rory didn't recognise, a guitar and a voice at a distance. "It's fine, Meg." "It isn't, Rory. We just say it's fine." That landed somewhere. Rory felt the truth of it move through her like a draught under a door. She looked at Megan — at the coat and the hair and the careful, competent face — and understood that this was what guilt looked like when it had four years to mature. Megan had built something real and solid and correct, and some part of it was an apology she'd never known how to send. "Pre-Law," Megan said quietly. "You were so good at it. Better than me." "I hated it." "I know. But you were good at it, and I always thought — eventually you'd finish and it would open out into something you actually wanted, and—" "That didn't happen." "No." Megan looked at the bar top. "No, it didn't." Outside, the rain started properly, drumming against the door. The woman with the gin and tonic gathered her coat. The maps on the wall seemed to lean forward slightly in the dim light, all those places mapped and named and still unknowable. "Are you happy?" Megan asked. The question was careful. Real. Rory considered it without armour, the way she used to do things before she'd learned not to. "I'm getting there," she said. "Are you?" Megan looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes that she didn't translate into words. "I'm very busy," she said finally. Rory picked up her wine. Megan picked up hers. They drank.