Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VZ4544DX5V09CSZH0JZJP

The delivery bag still hung from Rory's shoulder when she pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest, trailing the smell of sesame oil and the November cold. Silas stood behind the bar drying a tumbler, the green neon from the sign outside painting a stripe across his silver signet ring. He glanced at her, then at the bag. "Yu-Fei's working you late." "Last run." Rory dropped onto a stool and shrugged off the bag. Her cheeks stung from the wind. "Bloke in Fitzrovia ordered six portions of char siu and then pretended he wasn't home. I stood there ringing the bell like an idiot for ten minutes." Silas set a glass of water in front of her without being asked and moved down the bar to pour a whisky for one of the regulars. A Tuesday night, thin crowd. Two men in overcoats occupied a corner booth. A woman sat alone near the old maps on the far wall, scrolling through her phone, a half-finished gin and tonic sweating on the table. Rory barely registered any of them. She peeled open the rejected order and ate a piece of pork with her fingers. The woman near the maps stood up, phone still in hand, and walked toward the bar. Rory reached for another piece of char siu, and the woman stopped mid-stride. "Aurora?" Nobody called her that. Not here. Rory looked up, and the years collapsed like a telescope folding shut. Ceri Morgan stood three feet away in a charcoal coat that fit like it had been measured to the millimetre. Her dark hair, once a defiant tangle she'd refused to brush through three years of university, was blown straight and cut in a geometric line just above her jaw. Pearl studs. A leather bag that probably cost more than Rory's monthly rent. But the face was the same underneath all of it — the pointed chin, the gap between her front teeth that she used to say made her look like a jack-o'-lantern but that Rory had always found disarming. "Ceri." For a beat nothing happened. Then Ceri's mouth opened and closed and opened again, and the corporate architecture of her cracked just enough to show something raw. "God. It's — how long has it been?" "Four years. Almost five." "Five years." Ceri repeated it like she was reading a verdict. She pulled out the stool next to Rory and sat down without asking, and that at least was familiar. Ceri had never waited for invitations. Silas drifted back, took in the situation with the quick quiet read he gave everything, and raised an eyebrow at Rory. She gave him a small nod. He addressed Ceri. "What can I get you?" "Gin and tonic. Actually — no. Whisky. Whatever you'd recommend." He poured a measure of Talisker and set it in front of her, then moved away with the practised discretion that made Rory sometimes forget he'd ever been anything other than a bartender. Ceri stared at the glass. She hadn't touched it. "I thought you were in Cardiff." "I haven't been in Cardiff in three years." "Your mum said you'd gone travelling." "My mum says a lot of things." Rory folded the delivery bag twice and set it on the bar. Grease stained the canvas where the containers had leaked. She didn't bother hiding it. "What are you doing in Soho?" "Conference. Corporate mediation seminar at the Soho Hotel. Three days of people in lanyards arguing about conflict resolution, which is — " She stopped, laughed in a clipped way that had no warmth in it. "It's ironic, actually." "You're a mediator?" "I'm a partner at Haldane Ross. Commercial litigation." She said it the way someone might report the weather. "We handle mediation as part of the broader dispute resolution practice. It's — it pays well." Rory picked up her water. The old maps on the walls seemed to push in closer. Between her and Ceri there had once been no space at all — shared lecture notes, shared hangovers, shared cigarettes on the fire escape of their hall of residence while Cardiff rain hammered the metal stairs. Ceri had been the one who'd said the law was a blunt instrument, that they'd sharpen it together, that they'd open a practice in Splott and represent people who'd never hired a solicitor in their lives. That version of Ceri had worn oversized jumpers with holes in the elbows and argued through the night about sentencing reform. "You look different," Rory said. The words landed harder than she'd intended. Ceri's fingers tightened around the whisky glass. "People do. After five years." "That's not what I meant." "What did you mean?" Rory studied her. The pearl studs. The coat. The way Ceri sat with her spine unnaturally straight, shoulders pulled back, as though maintaining a shape that didn't come naturally. "You used to slouch." Ceri's jaw twitched. She drank the Talisker in one sharp pull and set the glass down. "And you used to study law instead of delivering Chinese food." The silence that followed had teeth. Silas, who'd been polishing glasses near the till, moved further down the bar. The two men in the corner booth were leaving, shrugging into their coats. "I'm sorry," Ceri said. "That was —" "Accurate." "Mean. It was mean." She pressed her thumb into the base of the glass, rotating it in a slow circle on the bartop. "I just. I didn't expect to see you. And you're sitting here with a delivery bag eating char siu with your fingers, and you look —" "What." "Happy." The word sat there like a stone dropped into still water. Rory felt the ripples of it move outward, touching things she hadn't examined in months. "Are you?" Rory asked. Ceri's rotation of the glass stopped. Her thumbnail had gone white from the pressure against it. In the silence, Rory could hear the faint old song leaking from the speakers overhead, something Silas had chosen, jazz or blues or whatever it was he played when the crowd thinned. "I have a flat in Canary Wharf. River view. I can see the O2 from my bathroom." Ceri smiled, and it looked like something she'd practised. "I made partner at thirty-one. Youngest in the firm's history. My mother keeps the Financial Times profile laminated on the fridge." "That's not what I asked." Ceri flagged Silas for another whisky. He poured. She wrapped both hands around it this time, and Rory noticed the tremor in her fingers. Slight. Easy to miss if you hadn't spent two years sitting next to someone in lecture halls, watching those same hands scribble furious marginalia in textbooks. "I heard about Evan," Ceri said. The pivot was so abrupt that Rory's stomach dropped before her brain caught up. She kept her face level. The crescent scar on her left wrist pulsed with a phantom itch. "Who told you?" "Eva. Last year. We bumped into each other at a bar in Bristol, funny enough. She'd had a few drinks and she told me — not details. Just that it had been bad and that you'd left Cardiff because of him." Ceri's eyes were wet now, and she blinked fiercely, as though angry at the tears for materialising. "I had no idea, Rory." The nickname landed soft, a key turning in an old lock. Rory hadn't heard Ceri say it in five years. "It wasn't your job to know." "I was your best friend." "You were in London by then. We'd already stopped calling." "That doesn't — " Ceri's voice splintered. She pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose. The woman who'd mastered corporate litigation at thirty-one sat in a Soho bar fighting for composure with the same ferocity she'd once reserved for arguing about judicial overreach. "I should have known. I should have — I was so wrapped up in the job and the partnership track and impressing people whose names I can't even remember anymore, and you were —" "I was handling it." "You were twenty-two." "And you were building a career. That's what we said we'd do." "No." Ceri shook her head. "That's what I said I'd do. You said we'd help people." She laughed, and this time it was genuine — wet and broken but genuine. "You were always the one who meant it." Rory looked at her hands. The delivery bag. The grease stain. She thought about Yu-Fei, who paid her in cash and leftover dumplings and asked no questions. About the flat upstairs with its crooked radiator and the window that stuck. About Silas, who'd given her a place to land when she'd arrived in London with a duffel bag and nothing resembling a plan. "I deliver food, Ceri. I'm not saving anyone." "You got yourself out." The sentence hung between them. Below it, like sediment at the bottom of a glass, all the things neither of them would say tonight. That Ceri had seen something wrong in their final year and chosen not to press. That Rory had stopped returning texts because it was easier to vanish than to explain. That time didn't heal so much as calcify, building up layers of distance that felt permanent until a woman in a charcoal coat walked up to you in a bar and said your name as though she still had a right to it. "I'm here until Thursday," Ceri said. She pulled a card from her bag and placed it on the bar. The card was heavy cream stock, embossed. CERI MORGAN — PARTNER — HALDANE ROSS LLP. A London number, an email, a small tasteful logo. Rory picked it up and turned it over. The back was blank. "I don't have a card," Rory said. "I don't need a card. I need your number written on a napkin." Rory looked at her. Ceri's mascara had smudged faintly beneath her left eye. The pearls gleamed under the bar's low light. Behind her, the old black-and-white photographs on the walls showed streets that no longer existed, captured in a moment before they'd been torn down and rebuilt as something unrecognisable. Rory reached across the bar for a pen — Silas kept one next to the register — and pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser. She wrote her number in the same cramped handwriting that had once filled the margins of their shared law notes. She slid it across. Ceri folded it carefully and put it in her coat pocket. She finished the second whisky. She placed a twenty-pound note on the bar, far more than the drinks cost, and stood. "The char siu smells incredible, by the way." "Want some? Bloke in Fitzrovia is never getting it." Ceri hesitated. For half a second the architecture fell away entirely, and she was just a girl on a fire escape in the rain, bumming a cigarette, saying they'd change the world. Then she buttoned her coat. "Thursday. Before my train. I'll call you." She walked out. The door swung shut behind her, and the green neon washed briefly across the floor and withdrew. Rory sat with the business card in one hand and a piece of cold pork in the other, and she stayed like that long enough for Silas to finish with his glasses and come back down. He looked at the card. Looked at her. "Old friend?" "Used to be." He nodded, the way he did when he understood more than the words offered, and poured her a small measure of the same Talisker without asking. Rory picked it up. She could still smell Ceri's perfume — something expensive and deliberate, nothing like the cheap vanilla body spray from their university days. The scent lingered at the edge of the bar like a question neither of them had known how to finish. She drank, and the whisky burned clean.