Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8VZD01DTPTQX4JEJZ2RVCV

The Raven's Nest was the kind of place that collected people like sediment. Old photographs watched from the walls, faces frozen mid-laugh or mid-argument, the years having done nothing to them. Rory sat at the far end of the bar with her delivery jacket still on, half a pint going warm in front of her, turning the glass without drinking it. Silas was behind the bar, polishing a tumbler with the slow attention of someone who had nowhere else to be. The Thursday crowd was thin—two men nursing whiskies by the window, a woman alone with a crossword—and the green neon from outside painted the floor in sick-ward light. The door opened. Rory didn't look up. She heard the brief surge of street noise, felt the draught, heard the door fall shut. Then she heard a voice. "Rory?" She knew it before she turned. Something in her chest did a complicated thing. Megan Davies stood three feet from the entrance with her coat still buttoned and her handbag clutched in both hands, as if she'd walked in expecting to need a quick exit. She was the same—that was the first thought. Same round face, same dark fringe cut low across her forehead, same habit of tilting her chin up when she was uncertain of something. She looked the same the way a place looks the same when you've been gone long enough to only remember the shape of it. "Meg." Rory set down her glass. "Christ." "I know." Megan crossed the room in quick steps, the relief on her face almost painful to look at. She stopped at the bar stool beside Rory, close enough to touch but not touching. "I wasn't sure it was you, actually. I nearly kept walking." "How did you—" "Eva." Megan's gaze dropped to her bag. "She told me you were in Soho. I've been in London for a conference, I thought—" She gestured at the room, at nothing in particular. "I thought maybe." Silas set down the tumbler. He didn't say anything, just tilted his head the precise amount required. "Gin and tonic," Megan told him, unclasping her bag. She glanced at Rory's glass. "Another?" "I'm fine." The words landed flat. Megan noticed. She took the stool and set her bag on the bar with the careful deliberateness of someone managing their own nerves. "You look different," she said. "Good different or bad different?" "Just different." Megan looked at her, a real look, the kind that only came from knowing someone back when they were still becoming a person. "Your hair." Rory touched the ends of it. She'd hacked it off herself six months after arriving in London, standing in the bathroom above this very bar with a pair of kitchen scissors and a specific feeling she'd never found a word for. "It grew back a bit," she said. "You were always growing it out at uni." Megan accepted her drink from Silas. "Always in between." Rory picked up her glass and drank. "How's Cardiff?" she asked. Megan turned the straw in her drink. "The same. Different. Mam sold the house in Roath, so that's strange. They're building on the old Artes Media site." She paused. "Your parents are well. I bumped into your mam at Christmas, she mentioned you." "What did she say?" "That you're busy." Megan looked at the delivery jacket. "She didn't say doing what." The jacket had Golden Empress embroidered on the left chest in red thread. Rory hadn't taken it off. She was aware of that now. "I deliver food," she said. "Chinese restaurant down the road." Megan's face did something careful. Not judgment, exactly. More like recognition held at a distance, the way you look at someone else's grief. "Is it—do you like it?" "It's fine." "Rory." "It pays." She turned to face Megan properly, the bar stool squeaking under the shift of her weight. "I'm fine, Meg. I know that's not what you expected me to say." "I didn't expect anything." But the coat was still buttoned. Silas moved to the other end of the bar, giving them the room that two people couldn't ask for themselves. "You finished your LLB," Rory said. It wasn't a question. "Passed the bar in November." A beat of something—pride, or an apology for it. "I'm in commercial law. It's not exciting but it's—" "It's what you wanted." "It's what we both wanted." Megan wrapped both hands around her glass. "You were better at it than me. You know that. Professor Haines used to read your essays out loud." "He read my essays out loud to prove a point about over-arguing." "He was impressed and you knew it." Megan stared at the bar top, at the rings left by a hundred other glasses. "Was it Evan?" The name landed the way names do when they've been kept out of a room for a long time. "Partly," Rory said. "Because I should have said something. About him. I saw things and I didn't—" Megan's jaw tightened. "I kept thinking it wasn't my business." "It wasn't." "That's not—" She stopped. Started again. "You can say that, and it's true, and it's also not what I mean." Rory looked at her. Megan's eyes were bright and not quite wet—the particular expression of someone who had rehearsed this conversation and found the rehearsal useless. "I know what you mean," Rory said. Outside, a bus went past, and the green neon shivered in the draught from the door as someone left. The two men by the window had gone. The woman with the crossword chewed her pen. "Do you miss it?" Megan asked. "The law?" Rory thought about the Pre-Law library on a November afternoon, the particular scratch of highlighter on a photocopy, the feeling of pulling apart a case until the argument inside it showed itself like something living. "Bits," she said. "I miss bits." "You could still—" "Meg." Megan closed her mouth. "I know," Rory said. "I could still. I know that." It was the kindness of the statement that made it useless. The could still, the not too late, the whole architecture of reassurance that people offered when what they meant was: I don't understand the choice you made, and I need you to tell me you're going to undo it. Rory had heard it from her mother. From Eva, occasionally. It always arrived dressed as encouragement and left feeling like something else. She didn't resent Megan for it. That was the thing she found strange, sitting here now with the years spread out between them like a map she'd never unfolded all the way—she couldn't locate any anger. Just something without a clean name, closer to the ache of touching a bruise you'd forgotten about. "I'm glad you came in," Rory said. Megan looked at her. "I mean it." Rory picked up her pint. "Even if it was Eva who told you where to look." A small laugh escaped Megan then, sudden and real. "She said you'd be annoyed about that." "She said I'd be annoyed because she knew I would be." "She also said to tell you she has your blue scarf. Apparently she's had it since 2019 and—" "She knows exactly where that scarf came from and she can keep it." Megan laughed again, properly this time, and the sound of it filled the bar the way old sounds do when they find their way back to a room they used to live in.