Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VG8BH9PC1FBT4VK8WXC95

The last delivery had been to a bedsit in Berwick Street — three floors up, lift out of service, a man in a paisley dressing gown who had watched Rory count out his change with the slow deliberateness of someone who had decided not to tip before he'd even opened the door. She'd said cheers, have a good one and meant neither, and walked back down into the rain. She didn't bother going up to the flat. She just kept walking until she was inside the bar. The Raven's Nest was a Tuesday-quiet, a handful of regulars scattered across the room like punctuation in an otherwise empty paragraph — a couple sharing a bottle of something red in the corner, a man in a good suit nursing whisky at the far end, the usual two old men whose names she still didn't know playing chess near the window. The green neon from the sign outside bled through the glass and lay across the floorboards in one long stripe. Old photographs watched from the walls. Old maps, too, framed and foxed with age, their borders crawling with the script of dead cartographers who had believed the world had edges. Silas was already setting a glass under the tap when she climbed onto the stool at the near end of the bar. He didn't ask what she wanted. He hardly ever did anymore. She pulled off her gloves and set them on the counter, and he placed the pint in front of her without ceremony — the brief flash of silver from his signet ring as he set it down, always that ring, always the right hand — the way you'd return something to a person who'd only set it down for a moment. "Rough one?" he said. "They're all rough ones." He made a sound that was neither agreement nor sympathy, exactly, and turned back toward the shelves. She noticed the slight drag of his left foot on the old floorboards as he went — barely a thing, but she'd learned to notice it. He carried himself with such deliberate evenness that the imperfection only made him seem more considered. She was halfway through her pint when the door opened. She didn't look up. The door opened all night; it was a bar. She registered the draught, the noise of the Friday street briefly spilling in, then silence as it closed. Footsteps. The scrape of a stool two seats down. "Rory?" The sound hit her like cold water. Not Aurora — that was her parents' word, deployed in proportion to how disappointed they were. Not Carter, the way Silas occasionally said it with something approaching dry amusement. Rory, with the Cardiff in it, the slight upswing at the end that was nearly a question. The sound of a specific number of years ago. She turned. Meg Davies looked almost exactly the same, which was the first thing Rory noticed, and immediately resented. The same dark hair, longer now, pulled back in a smooth knot that managed to seem effortless. The same directness in her eyes — a quality Rory had always found both impressive and slightly exhausting. She wore a coat that suggested a certain salary range and she carried a soft leather briefcase with the ease of someone who had stopped noticing its weight. "Oh my God," Meg said. "It is you." "It is," Rory agreed. Three years. Three years and two months, though Rory wasn't being precise — the figure had simply always been there, the way a bruise you'd stopped touching was still exactly where you knew it to be. They'd spoken twice since Rory left Cardiff: once in the first week when she'd still been findable, once six months after that when Meg had called and Rory had let it ring through to voicemail and then written seventeen draft replies and sent none of them. Meg moved to the stool beside her, pulling off her coat with practiced efficiency, and Silas materialized without being summoned. He had a quality like that — an unnerving capacity to be precisely where something was needed. "Whatever she's having," Meg said, nodding at Rory's glass, and when he'd gone she turned back with the expression of someone still processing the coordinates of a significant coincidence. "I'm here for a conference. The firm's in some hotel off Carnaby Street — terrible curtains, the food is somehow worse. I stepped out for a walk and just—" She gestured at the room, slightly helpless about it. "The sign was nice." "Yeah," Rory said. "It is." "You live here?" "Above here." Meg's eyebrows moved. It wasn't cruelty — Meg had never been cruel in that way — but it was legible. The microsecond recalibration. The revising of expectations against what was actually present. "How long?" she asked. "Eight months." "And you like it?" Rory considered the question with more seriousness than it probably deserved. "I like London," she said at last. "I like having somewhere to be." Silas returned with Meg's pint and withdrew again. The couple in the corner shared a burst of quiet laughter, then subsided. The chess game continued in its unhurried way. "I heard you left the course," Meg said. "Third year." "Yeah." A pause that was not unfriendly. Just the kind that opens when two people simultaneously realise they are approaching a landscape that will require careful navigation. "How long have you been doing deliveries?" "Since September. It's fine work. You're just moving. One place to the next." "That sounds like something you made peace with." "Most things are worth making peace with." Meg studied her with the same focused attention she'd once directed at case studies, at problems she was determined to fully understand. Rory remembered those annotated margins, the colour-coded notes, the way Meg had talked about contract law at parties without a trace of apology and Rory had found it both exhausting and quietly admirable. "How's the firm?" Rory asked. Meg lit up slightly, which was automatic. "It's good. Hard. I mean, genuinely brutal in ways no one quite prepares you for. But I'm up for review in March. My supervisor's terrifying, but she's brilliant, and I think I'm—" She paused, smiled, recognized the old habit of underselling good news. "I think I'm doing well." "That's brilliant, Meg. Honestly." "Thank you." Meg turned the glass in her hands. "I ran into Evan," she said. "A few months ago. He's—" "I don't need to know," Rory said. It came out quiet. Not hard, not sharp — just final in the way of something that had been decided a long time ago and required no revisiting. Meg stopped mid-sentence. She looked at Rory and something moved across her face — surprise, then recognition, then something older and more uncomfortable, the expression of someone stitching together context they should have had far sooner. "Right," Meg said. "Sorry." "It's fine." "No, I—" She wrapped both hands around her glass. Her voice was lower now. "I always thought — after you stopped answering — I thought for a long time that I'd done something. Said something wrong. And then I thought—" She pressed her lips together. "I had some idea. Eventually. About why you really went." She looked at the bar counter, at the rings left by her glass. "I noticed things, when things seemed. When he was—" She stopped. "I should have said something." Rory said nothing. "I should have," Meg said again. "You didn't know." "I had some idea." The honesty of it sat between them. Rory turned the glass slowly in her hands, felt the cool condensation against her palm, the small crescent scar at her wrist catching the amber of the bar light as she turned it — that old mark, curved like a quarter moon, from a fall she barely remembered but had carried always. "I'm not angry at you," Rory said. "I was. Not really at you, specifically. But I was." She shook her head. "It was a long time ago." Meg nodded. She wasn't going to push, which was either wisdom or relief, and Rory was quietly grateful for it either way. "You seem different," Meg said. "Do I." "Not badly. Just—" She searched for the word with the care of someone who had learned that loosely chosen words were expensive. "Stiller, maybe. Settled in yourself. Does that make sense?" Rory thought about it honestly. "Maybe," she said. "You were always in motion before. Your eyes, I mean. You were always slightly at an angle to everything, like you were watching for the nearest exit." She paused. "That's not a terrible thing to say, is it?" "No," Rory said. "It's accurate." "Now you just look like you know where you are." Outside, a bus went past and its orange glow streaked briefly across the window, then was gone. "I miss you," Meg said. "I know that sounds — I know it's been years, and you clearly have a life here, a real one. But I miss things being simpler. I miss when we were just in that flat, just studying and complaining about it and sitting in that terrible kitchen." "The kitchen was terrible," Rory agreed. "The hob only worked on one side." "The extractor fan sounded like it was dying." "It was dying. Constantly. Like a very drawn-out process, over two years." They were both briefly smiling. The years between them were still there but they'd become something different for a moment — not distance but dimension, the space that gave things shape. Rory finished the last of her pint and set the glass down. "I am a different person," she said. "That's the honest answer, I think, to whatever question you've been working around." She looked at the counter, at the old wood of it. "I don't know if the version I was would have managed this. Being here. It took the leaving to make any of it make sense." She almost laughed, a small rueful sound. "I still don't entirely know what I'm doing. But I'm doing it." Meg held her gaze for a moment longer than was strictly comfortable, and in it Rory saw the outline of everything her friend had not said three years ago — the hesitations, the polite avoidances, the kindnesses taken a degree too far in the wrong direction. She didn't think Meg was a bad person. She never had. People got things wrong in so many ordinary ways, and the ordinariness of it was the hardest part to forgive, because it left nothing to push against. "I'm glad you're alright," Meg said. "I am, I think." Meg reassembled herself with practiced efficiency — coat, briefcase, the gathering of a person who had places to be and the habit of returning to them. She glanced around the bar once, at the old maps on the walls, at the faded photographs, at Silas who had moved to the far end of the counter and stood reading with a stillness that managed to suggest he had noticed nothing while almost certainly having noticed everything. "It's a good bar," she said. "Yeah," said Rory. "It is." Meg rested her hand on Rory's arm for just a moment — not a hug, which would have been too easy, a resolution they hadn't quite earned — just the brief warm weight of it, acknowledgment and apology carried in the same small gesture. Then she left, and the door let the rain in for a second and then gave it back to the street. Rory sat with the empty glass in front of her. After a while, Silas made his way back. He didn't ask. He lifted her glass and filled it, and placed it back on the mat, and that was all. "Thanks, Si," she said. He nodded once and went back to his book. The green neon pulsed its slow colour through the window. The chess game went on. Rory wrapped both hands around the fresh glass and let the cold of it spread up through her palms, past the crescent scar, up into her chest, where something old and still tender was doing the quiet, patient work of becoming scar tissue.