Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VX8ZY45A71XFYGRB5NEEM

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, closest to the wall of old maps, her delivery bag slumped on the stool beside her like a tired companion. The last run of the night had taken her to a Mayfair flat where the woman who opened the door held a Pomeranian in one arm and tipped sixty pence with the other. Rory had smiled. She'd walked back to Soho in the rain. Silas set a fresh gin and tonic in front of her without being asked, his silver signet ring catching the low light as he placed the glass precisely on a coaster. He moved behind the bar with the quiet economy of a man who'd spent decades making himself unobtrusive in rooms, his limp barely noticeable unless you knew to look for it. "You're dripping on my bartop," he said. "Your bartop's seen worse." "That's not the counterargument you think it is." He draped a clean towel over her shoulder, the gesture almost fatherly, then moved down the bar to tend to a couple murmuring over whiskeys. Rory pressed the towel against her hair, wringing the rain from the black strands, and pulled out her phone. Two missed calls from her mother. A text from Yu-Fei asking her to cover a Saturday shift. She was composing a reply when the door opened and the green neon from the sign outside bled briefly across the floor. The woman who entered wore a camel-colored coat that looked like it cost more than Rory's rent. Her dark hair was pulled back in a low chignon, and she carried herself with that particular London posture — shoulders back, chin steady, the body language of someone who'd learned to take up space in rooms full of men. She was scanning the bar for a table when her eyes passed over Rory, continued to the far wall, and then snapped back. Rory felt the recognition hit her stomach before it reached her brain. "Rory? Rory Carter?" Gemma Price. She was already crossing the room, heels clicking against the old hardwood, her face breaking into an expression of such unguarded surprise that for a moment she looked exactly like the girl who used to fall asleep in Torts lectures with a highlighter still uncapped in her hand. "Gemma," Rory said. She stood, and the delivery bag tumbled off the stool to the floor. She left it there. Gemma pulled her into a hug that smelled like expensive perfume and the particular warmth of someone who'd just come out of a heated car. When she pulled back, she held Rory at arm's length and studied her face with the openness of someone who hadn't yet calculated what to say. "God, it's been — what, four years? Five?" Gemma slid onto the stool beside her, already shrugging off the coat to reveal a charcoal blazer, a thin gold chain at her throat. "I didn't know you were in London. Last I heard you were still in Cardiff finishing your articles. Or was it the LPC? I can't remember." "I didn't finish," Rory said. She sat back down and took a sip of her gin. The tonic had gone flat while she'd been wringing out her hair. "I moved here about two years ago." "Two years, and I haven't run into you once? London, honestly." Gemma caught Silas's eye and ordered a Sauvignon Blanc with the easy decisiveness of someone used to being served quickly. "What firm are you with?" "I'm not with a firm." "In-house, then? Don't tell me you went corporate. You swore you'd rather eat glass." "I deliver food," Rory said. "For a Chinese restaurant in Soho." The silence that followed lasted only a second, but Rory watched it move through Gemma's face like weather. Surprise. A flicker of something that might have been pity. Then a careful rearrangement into neutrality that Rory recognized as lawyerly discipline. "Right," Gemma said. "Well. That's — is it good? Do you like it?" "The owner's brilliant. She makes this kung pao chicken that could end wars." Rory turned her glass on the coaster. "It's just a job, Gem. I'm not curing cancer. But I'm not pretending I am, either." Silas brought the wine without comment, though Rory felt his gaze linger for a moment before he withdrew. He had that instinct — the quiet triangulation of a man who'd once read rooms for a living. Gemma took a long sip, and when she set the glass down, some of the professional veneer had softened. "I just — I think about that mock trial in second year, you know? Richards said you were the sharpest student he'd seen in a decade. He told Professor Montague the same thing at the faculty dinner. You had this way of — you'd find the one thread everyone else had missed and just pull." "Richards said a lot of things. He also said the European Court of Human Rights was a passing fad." "I'm serious, Rory." "I know you are. That's why I'm deflecting." Gemma laughed — a short, honest sound — and for a moment the years collapsed and they were sitting in the student union sharing a plate of chips, talking about nothing that mattered. But the moment passed, because moments like that always do, and Rory watched Gemma's eyes drop to the delivery bag on the floor, the Golden Empress logo visible on its side, grease-stained and fraying at one strap. "What happened?" Gemma asked quietly. "I tried to call. After you left Cardiff, I must have rung you twenty times. Eva said you needed space, so I gave you space, but — Christ, Rory, you just vanished." Rory traced the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist with her thumb, an old habit she hadn't managed to break. The scar was from childhood — she'd caught it on a fence climbing after a neighbour's cat — but the gesture had taken on new meaning in the years since, a touchstone she reached for when she needed to remind herself that not every hurt left a mark you could see. "I had some things to sort out," she said. "What kind of things?" "The kind that don't make for good bar conversation." Gemma set her wine down. "We used to talk about everything." "We used to be twenty-one. We used to think the world was a problem set with a solution at the back of the book." Rory looked at her. "You're doing well. I can tell. Where did you end up?" The redirect worked, mostly. Gemma was at a mid-size firm in the City — commercial litigation, she said, which meant she spent most of her days arguing about contract clauses and the rest of them trying to remember why she'd wanted to. She'd made junior partner eight months ago. She had a flat in Bermondsey. A fiancé named Oliver who worked in sustainable architecture and owned too many succulents. "He proposed in Lisbon," Gemma said. "On a rooftop. With port wine. It was disgustingly romantic." "Sounds lovely." "It was. It is." Gemma paused. "He's kind, Rory. He's genuinely kind. That was the thing I didn't know I was looking for until I found it." Something tightened behind Rory's ribs. She thought of Evan — not the Evan she'd first met, the one who brought her coffee before lectures and learned her mother's birthday, but the other one. The one who'd surface at two in the morning smelling of whiskey and certainty, who knew exactly how to make an apology sound like an accusation. She thought of the night she'd left, the way she'd packed a bag with her hands shaking so badly she'd zipped her own thumb into the suitcase. She thought of the three buses it had taken to get to Eva's flat, and how she'd stood on the doorstep for five full minutes before she could make herself knock, because some part of her was still calculating whether she deserved to. "Kindness is underrated," Rory said. Gemma watched her with those careful brown eyes, and Rory could see the questions stacking up behind them, organized and precise — Gemma had always been good at building a case from fragments. She'd be connecting the disappearance from Cardiff, the dropped career, the vague language about things to sort out. Rory could see the shape of the word forming before Gemma said it. "Was it Evan?" Rory didn't flinch. She'd trained herself out of flinching. But she took a breath that went deeper than it needed to, and when she exhaled, the sound was steady in a way that was its own kind of answer. "Gem." "You don't have to tell me. I know you don't have to tell me." "Then don't ask." "I should have asked sooner. I should have — when we were still in Cardiff, I saw things. Small things. The way you'd go quiet when your phone buzzed, or cancel plans at the last minute, or show up to lectures wearing long sleeves in June. I told myself it was stress. I told myself it wasn't my business." Gemma's voice cracked on the last word, and she pressed her fingertips against the base of her wineglass as though steadying herself. "I've thought about it. More than you'd believe. I've thought about what I should have said." The bar hummed around them — the low murmur of the couple by the window, a jazz track drifting from speakers mounted above the black-and-white photographs on the wall, Silas polishing glasses with quiet, deliberate strokes. The green neon sign outside threw its glow against the rain-streaked window, making everything look slightly subaqueous. Rory looked at Gemma and saw two people at once: the girl who used to leave annotated notes in her locker before exams, and the woman who'd spent the last four years carrying guilt for a silence she'd chosen when they were barely more than kids. The distance between those two people was the same distance Rory felt between herself and the girl who'd once believed she'd end up in a courtroom. Time didn't erase people; it just laid new versions over the old ones like acetate on a map, so the original lines showed through if you held it to the light. "You couldn't have fixed it," Rory said. "No one could have fixed it except me. And even I couldn't fix it — I could only leave." "And you did." "And I did." Gemma nodded slowly. She picked up her wine and drank, and when she set it down again her eyes were bright but her jaw was set, the way it used to get before closing arguments. "I'm sorry I let you vanish." "I'm sorry I needed to." They sat with that for a while. Outside, a bus hissed past. Someone laughed on the street. The ordinary machinery of London grinding forward without regard for the small, enormous things that happened in bars after dark. "I should go," Gemma said eventually. "Oliver's cooking, and if I'm late he'll worry. He's a worrier." She paused. "Can I give you my number? My new one?" Rory pulled out her phone. Gemma typed her number in and handed it back. Their fingers brushed, and for a moment neither of them moved. "You were the sharpest person I ever met," Gemma said. "You still are. I can tell because you're the only person who's ever made me feel stupid for being successful." "That's not what I'm doing." "I know. That's why it works." Gemma pulled on her coat and lifted her bag. She stood there for a moment, and Rory could feel her wanting to say more — to argue the case, to build toward some closing statement about potential and waste and roads not taken. But Gemma had always known when to rest her case. "Take care of yourself, Rory." "Yeah. You too, Gem." She watched Gemma walk to the door, watched her pause just before stepping out into the rain, watched her choose not to look back. The door swung shut. The green light swallowed her. Silas appeared at Rory's elbow, replacing her flat gin and tonic with a fresh one. He leaned against the bar, arms folded, and looked at the door. "Old friend?" he asked. "Old life." He nodded, as though the distinction needed no explanation, and moved away to tend to his quiet bar. Rory sat for a long time with the new drink untouched in front of her, turning her phone over in her hands. Gemma's number glowed on the screen. She stared at it the way she used to stare at case law, looking for the argument that would hold up under pressure. Then she saved the contact, shouldered her delivery bag, and went upstairs to her flat. The rain had stopped by the time she reached the landing, and through the window she could see the green neon of The Raven's Nest sign reflected in the wet street below, pulsing gently, like something still alive.