Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VDR9DCA7F1TRGBM9W33FZ

The Raven's Nest was the kind of quiet that only came after eleven, when the foot traffic outside thinned to couples walking close and the occasional taxi hissing through a puddle. Rory had been sitting at the far end of the bar for the better part of an hour, her delivery bag slung over the stool beside her, a glass of house red she'd barely touched standing sentinel on the dark wood in front of her. She wasn't drinking so much as occupying space — the difference, she'd come to understand, between needing a drink and needing somewhere to be. Silas was restocking the back shelf, moving with the unhurried economy of someone who'd learned long ago not to waste motion. The slight drag of his left leg was nearly imperceptible unless you knew to look for it, and Rory, who knew, wasn't looking. She was watching the old maps on the far wall the way you watch television when you're not really watching — taking in the shapes without registering the meaning. She heard the door. Not the sound of it, exactly. She'd stopped consciously cataloguing sounds sometime in the first months after she'd moved to London, when every hinge-creak and footfall had still made her shoulders go up. Now it was more animal than that — a shift in the air, a change in the quality of the room's attention. She turned on her stool. The woman in the doorway had the look of someone who'd pushed through several wrong doors before finding the right one. She was shaking rain from an umbrella that had clearly lost the argument with the weather, and her coat — smart wool, the kind of coat you bought for a job interview and then just kept wearing — was dark at the shoulders. She looked up, and the green neon from the sign outside caught the planes of her face through the window. Rory recognised her in the chest before she registered the face. Megan Rees. Twenty-six now, probably. Black hair blown out properly, where Rory's just fell where gravity put it. A bit of weight in her face that hadn't been there before, which only made her look more settled, more like herself. She'd always been the kind of pretty that improved with time, Rory thought, distantly, the way you think things when your mind is running slightly ahead of what your body is prepared to do. Megan saw her. The pause lasted perhaps two seconds. In two seconds, Rory watched something move across Megan's face — surprise first, then a complicated pleasure, then something that flinched and recovered so quickly she might have imagined it. "Rory." Megan said it softly, the Cardiff vowels still wrapped around the word like they always had been. She crossed the bar toward her, and Rory slid off her stool and let herself be hugged, one arm going around Megan's damp shoulder, her chin briefly at Megan's temple. She smelled the same. L'Occitane something, and underneath that the specific warmth of another person's skin that you never quite forget once you know it. They separated and looked at each other with the careful calibration of two people taking stock of damage. "What are you—" Rory started. "Conference thing," Megan said. She gestured vaguely at the ceiling, meaning the city beyond it. "Marketing. It's three days, they put us up in a hotel off Carnaby Street. I've been walking for about forty minutes trying to find somewhere that wasn't rammed." She looked around at the old photographs, the amber-lit bottles, the maps. "This is nice. It's very—" "It's where I live," Rory said. "Upstairs." Megan's eyes came back to her. "Right. Of course Eva said—" She stopped. Silas had appeared at the bar with the quiet inevitability he managed, setting a clean glass down in front of the empty stool with a look of polite inquiry. His hazel eyes moved once between the two women and then settled into the neutral hospitality of a man who knew when not to interfere. "Red?" he said to Megan. "Please." She sat, and Rory sat beside her, and for a moment neither of them said anything while Silas poured and withdrew to the far end of the bar, where he found something to occupy himself with at a volume that suggested he was neither present nor absent. "You look well," Megan said. She meant it, Rory thought. She also meant something else by it, something that lived in the slight emphasis — the way well carried a question inside it. You look well, considering. You look well, after everything. You look well; I half expected otherwise. "You too," Rory said. She picked up her wine glass. "How's Cardiff?" "Cardiff is Cardiff. Wet. Same." Megan wrapped her hands around her glass. She had new rings — one on her right hand, three on her left, a thin gold band among them that hadn't been there three years ago. Rory clocked it and said nothing. "Gwen's got a baby now. Did Eva tell you?" "She mentioned it." "Little girl. She's enormous now, the baby, she's walking. It happens so fast." Megan laughed softly and then the laugh ran out before it was finished. She traced the rim of her glass with one finger. "It was strange. When you left. How fast everything — I mean, we just woke up one day and you were gone." Rory felt the sentence like a stone dropped into still water. She waited for the ripples to reach the edge before she spoke. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry." "I'm not—" Megan shook her head. "I'm not saying it to make you feel bad. I just. I didn't understand it at the time." She looked at Rory with a directness that was new, or that Rory had forgotten. "I think I understand it better now." The bar made its small sounds around them. Ice settling in a bucket. A car outside. Silas's silver ring tapping once against a glass and then going still. "Evan's seeing someone," Megan said. "One of the law girls. She's very nice." A beat. "She seems fine." She seems fine. The architecture of that sentence was load-bearing in ways Rory wasn't going to unpick at the bar on a Tuesday night. She thought about the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the way she always wore her sleeve down in winter now not to hide it but simply because she'd stopped thinking about it. She thought about the version of herself that Megan still seemed to be addressing — the twenty-two-year-old who'd studied contract law and gone to the same four pubs on rotation and thought that the shape her life was taking was more or less fixed. "Good," she said. She meant it, more or less. Megan turned to look at her properly — not the half-turned, careful glances they'd been trading, but full on, the way you looked at someone when you were done being careful. In the low light, her eyes were dark and a little wet, and Rory thought: she's been carrying something too. She'd just been carrying it in a different direction. "I should have called," Megan said. "After you left. I kept picking up my phone and then I didn't know what to say, and then time—" She exhaled. "Time just went." "I know how that works." "You could have called me, too." "I know," Rory said. "I could have." Neither of them said: but you knew him too, and I didn't know which side you'd land on. Neither of them said: but some silences are answers. They didn't need to. The years were there in the room with them, taking up space. Megan lifted her glass, and Rory lifted hers, and they didn't toast to anything because there was nothing appropriate to toast to, but the gesture did something anyway. Acknowledged the distance across the bar rail, the strangeness of finding each other in this specific city in this specific room among old maps and the smell of rain, the way the past was always closer than you thought and further away than you could bear. "Tell me something good," Megan said. Rory thought about it. About Yu-Fei's restaurant and the weight of the delivery bag and the streets of Soho at seven in the morning when she came down to help Silas take in a delivery, the way the city moved and didn't wait for you to be ready for it. About the fact that she slept through the night now, mostly. About the fact that she was sitting here at all. "I'm learning the city," she said. "All of it. The back roads. I know things now about this part of London that I didn't know anyone could know." Megan smiled at that — a real smile, the one that went up on the left side first. The one Rory had known since they were seventeen. "That sounds like you," she said. "That sounds exactly like you." Rory hadn't known, until that moment, how much she'd needed to hear that something still did.