Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VKEPVEXHSAPV7FZ4C8DF2

The Tuesday crowd at The Raven's Nest was thin enough that Rory heard the door before she saw it open. A blade of streetlight cut across the floorboards, and with it came a gust of October air that smelled like rain and the kebab shop two doors down. She didn't look up. She was three-quarters through a pint of Silas's house bitter and a dog-eared copy of a Graham Greene novel she'd found wedged behind the radiator in her flat, and she'd earned both after eight hours navigating London traffic on a moped with a hot bag strapped to her back. Silas stood behind the bar, drying a glass with the particular slowness of a man who had learned that stillness was its own kind of currency. The green neon from the sign outside bled through the window and caught the silver of his signet ring as he worked. He glanced toward the door, then back at Rory, and something in his expression shifted—a minute tightening around the eyes that she'd learned to read in the fourteen months she'd lived above his bar. "Friend of yours," he said quietly. Rory looked up. The woman standing just inside the doorway was wearing a charcoal wool coat that fit like it had been cut for her body specifically, which it probably had. Her hair was shorter than Rory remembered—cropped close at the sides, swept back in a way that was either effortless or engineered to appear so. She carried a leather satchel over one shoulder and held her phone in her left hand like a talisman, the screen still glowing. She was scanning the room the way people do when they're looking for someone who isn't there yet, and then her gaze snagged on Rory and went still. Cerys Howell. Three years. No—closer to four. The last time Rory had seen her, they'd been sitting on the floor of Cerys's student flat in Cathays, splitting a bottle of Chilean red and arguing about whether tort reform was inherently political or merely procedural. Cerys had been in joggers and a hoodie with a bleach stain on the sleeve, her dark hair in a knot held together by a biro, and she'd laughed so hard at something Rory said that wine had come out of her nose. That version of Cerys existed now only in Rory's memory, a ghost pressed flat between the pages of a life she'd closed. This Cerys crossed the room in four strides. Her heels clicked on the old wood like a metronome. "Rory." She said the name as though testing whether it still fit in her mouth. "Rory Carter." "Cerys." They looked at each other. The moment had the quality of a photograph developing—details surfacing slowly, the contrast sharpening. Cerys's face was thinner. She'd had her teeth straightened. There were small diamond studs in her ears that caught the low amber light of the bar, throwing pinpricks of white across the nearest black-and-white photograph on the wall—some anonymous city street from decades past. "Can I—" Cerys gestured at the empty stool beside her, and Rory nodded, because what else do you do when the past walks in and sits down next to you? Silas materialized with the quiet competence of a man who'd spent decades reading rooms. "What can I get you?" "Gin and tonic, please. Hendrick's if you have it." He did. Rory watched him build the drink—the precise pour, the single curl of cucumber—and felt a strange gratitude for the ritual of it, the way it filled the silence that was already thickening between them. The old maps on the walls seemed to lean inward, as though the room itself were listening. "I can't believe this," Cerys said, shaking her head. She was smiling, but the smile had a seam running through it. "I was supposed to meet a client here. He cancelled twenty minutes ago, and I almost turned around, but—" She gestured vaguely at the bar, at Rory, at the implausibility of the moment. "What are the odds?" "London's smaller than it pretends to be." "You live here? In Soho?" "Upstairs, actually." Rory tilted her head toward the ceiling. "Silas rents me the flat." Cerys looked around The Raven's Nest as though seeing it properly for the first time—the maps, the photographs, the bruised leather of the booth seats, the shelf of books in the corner that was really a shelf of books. Her gaze moved like an assessor's, quick and categorizing, and Rory recognized the habit. It was new. Pre-Law Cerys had looked at rooms the way most people did, without inventory. "It's got character," Cerys said. "It does." Silas set the gin and tonic down without a word and moved to the far end of the bar, where he resumed his work with a cloth and glass. He was close enough to hear everything and professional enough to pretend otherwise. The slight limp in his left leg was barely visible when he moved behind the bar—the geography of it compensated for what his knee couldn't. Cerys took a sip of her drink and set it down carefully, both hands around the glass. "I tried to find you, you know. After you left Cardiff." There it was. The thing underneath the thing. "Eva told me," Rory said. "She wouldn't give me your number." "I know." "I wasn't—" Cerys stopped. She pressed her lips together and looked at the bar top, at the ring of water her glass had already begun to leave. "I wasn't trying to push. I was worried. You just disappeared. One week you were in Professor Alderman's seminar arguing about parliamentary sovereignty, and the next you were gone. Your mum wouldn't say where. Your dad looked at me like I'd done something wrong." Rory turned the Greene novel face-down on the bar and traced the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist with her thumb. She did this without thinking about it—a tic she'd developed in the years since Cardiff, a way of pressing her fingers to the proof that she'd once been a different person, younger and more breakable. The scar was from childhood, a stupid accident involving a fence and a dare, but it had become a kind of touchstone. A place her hands went when the conversation turned toward territory she'd fenced off. "I wasn't in a position to explain," she said. "Not then." "And now?" Rory looked at Cerys—really looked. The charcoal coat, the diamond studs, the cropped hair that spoke of a woman who'd decided exactly who she wanted to be and then became her. Cerys had always been the focused one. Where Rory zigzagged, Cerys drove straight. She'd wanted to practice family law since she was seventeen, and Rory would have bet her last delivery tip that Cerys had done exactly that. "You're a barrister," Rory said. Not a question. Something passed across Cerys's face—a flicker of surprise, then a careful blankness. "Solicitor. Fenton Harper, in the City. Family division." "Of course." "What does that mean?" "It means you did it. The thing you always said you'd do." Cerys looked at her drink. "You say that like it's a verdict." "It's not. I mean it. I'm glad." But the word glad landed wrong, too light for the weight it was trying to carry, and they both felt it. Rory picked up her pint and drank. The bitter was warm now, slightly flat, and it tasted the way this whole conversation felt—something that had been sitting out too long, losing its edge. "I heard about Evan," Cerys said quietly. The name dropped into the space between them like a coin into still water. Rory watched the ripples move through her own body—the slight tensing of her shoulders, the way her jaw set, the instinct to deflect or stand or simply leave. She'd gotten better at not doing those things. Fourteen months above The Raven's Nest, fourteen months of Silas's particular brand of gruff, unhurried decency, had taught her that not every mention of the past required a tactical response. "From who?" she asked. "Lowri Davies. She ran into Eva at a conference in Bristol last year. She said—" Cerys paused, choosing words with the precision of someone trained to understand their legal weight. "She said it was bad. That it had been bad for a while." Rory said nothing. Down the bar, Silas had stopped pretending to dry glasses and was instead studying one of the old maps on the wall as though he'd never seen it before. The gesture was so transparent it was almost tender. "I keep thinking about that night at mine," Cerys said. "The red wine. The tort reform argument. You had a bruise on your forearm, and when I asked about it, you said you'd walked into a door at the library." "I might have walked into a door at the library." "Rory." "I know." She exhaled through her nose. "I know I didn't." The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of things—of Cerys's guilt at not having pushed harder, of Rory's guilt at having made herself so easy to believe. Of the particular cruelty of hindsight, which illuminates everything and repairs nothing. "I should have asked again," Cerys said. Her voice was steady, but her hands had tightened around her glass. "I should have asked a hundred times." "You couldn't have known." "I should have known." "Cerys." Rory turned on her stool so they were facing each other. Cerys's eyes were dark and bright, and in them Rory could see the girl from the student flat—underneath the tailoring, underneath the diamond studs and the practiced composure, the girl who'd cried on the phone when Rory told her she was dropping out, who'd driven to Rory's parents' house and rung the bell until Brendan Carter opened the door and told her, politely but firmly, that Aurora wasn't taking visitors. "It wasn't yours to carry. It still isn't." "I'm a family solicitor, Rory. I spend every day telling women that they're not alone, that there are systems, that people care. And I couldn't even—" She broke off. Pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. "Sorry. God. I'm sorry. This isn't fair. I walk in here and dump four years of—" "It's fine." "It's not fine. I've rehearsed this conversation in my head about three hundred times, and it never goes like this." "How does it go?" "You tell me you're all right. I believe you. We order another round and talk about something that doesn't matter." Rory considered this. She ran her thumb along the scar again, then stopped herself and laid both hands flat on the bar—a deliberate gesture, palms down, fingers spread. "I am all right," she said. "And I'd like another round. And I don't particularly want to talk about tort reform." Cerys laughed—a short, raw sound, closer to a cough than anything—and wiped her eye with the back of her wrist. The diamond stud caught the light again. "What are you doing now?" Cerys asked, in the careful, open-ended way that meant she was trying not to judge the answer. "Deliveries. There's a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. The Golden Empress. The owner's brilliant—Yu-Fei, she's about four foot eleven and she runs the kitchen like a general." Cerys nodded slowly. "Do you like it?" The question was simple, but Rory understood what was underneath it—the calculus Cerys was running, measuring the distance between a Pre-Law student at Cardiff University and a delivery driver in Soho, trying to determine whether the gap represented a fall or a choice or something more complicated than either. "I do," Rory said. "It's not forever. But I like it." "Okay." Cerys nodded again, and this time the nod was smaller, more private, as though she were giving herself permission to accept the answer. "Okay." Silas appeared with another bitter for Rory and a fresh gin and tonic for Cerys, unbidden. He set them down, and for just a moment his hand rested on the bar near Rory's—not touching, but close, the silver signet ring catching the light—and she understood the gesture for what it was. A check-in. A quiet confirmation that she was steady. She was steady. "Tell me about Fenton Harper," she said to Cerys, and watched the relief move through her old friend's shoulders like a wave easing back from shore. "Tell me about the offices. Are they glass? I always imagined they'd be glass." "Floor to ceiling," Cerys said, and something in her voice loosened. "You can see the Thames if you lean." "And do you lean?" "Every bloody day." They sat there in The Raven's Nest, two women shaped by different pressures into forms neither would have predicted, and they talked. Not about the years between, not yet—that territory was mined and would require careful crossing on a night when they both had more courage or less sobriety. They talked about glass offices and delivery routes, about a restaurant owner who commanded a kitchen and a law firm that never closed, about the particular quality of London rain versus Cardiff rain, which was the same rain but somehow not. And underneath the talk, in the spaces between sentences, something cautious and persistent was happening—the slow, imperfect work of two people deciding that the bridge between who they'd been and who they'd become was worth crossing, even if they couldn't see the other side. Outside, the green neon sign of The Raven's Nest hummed against the October dark, and the city moved around them, vast and indifferent and full of rooms like this one—rooms where people found each other again and tried, with whatever tools they had, to mean it.