Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WCDKPTRCTC59JKS190W5J

The Tuesday crowd at the Raven's Nest was thin — a handful of regulars nursing their usual poisons, a couple near the window sharing one drink between them for the better part of an hour. Silas had retreated to his back room with a ledger that likely had nothing to do with the bar's actual accounts, and Rory had slipped behind the counter without being asked, mostly because standing still made her restless and pulling pints gave her hands something to do. She was wiping down the bar when the door opened. The woman who walked in had the particular bearing of someone used to making entrances — not performatively, but structurally, as though she'd arranged her posture around the expectation of being noticed. She wore a dark wool coat, the kind that cost more than a month of Rory's rent, and her blonde hair was cut in a way that suggested a stylist with a waiting list. She scanned the room with the practiced efficiency of someone assessing a situation for value. Her eyes landed on Rory. Neither of them moved. "Cecily." The name came out before Rory had made any conscious decision to speak it. Cecily Holt crossed the room in four quick strides and stopped at the bar, gripping its edge with both hands as if she needed it for balance. "Aurora Carter." Her voice had the same quality it always had — precise, a fraction warmer than her expression suggested. "You're standing behind a bar in Soho." "Excellent observation." "I'm a barrister. I'm paid to observe." But the corner of her mouth moved. "God. How long has it been?" "Three years. Give or take." "Give or take." Cecily released the bar and straightened. "You disappeared. Entirely. Eva wouldn't tell anyone where you'd gone." "Eva wasn't supposed to." "I know that now." A short pause. "Can I sit?" Rory gestured at the stool. Cecily settled onto it with the careful precision of someone in expensive clothes, laying her bag on the bar beside her — a structured leather thing that probably had a name Rory wouldn't recognise. Something about that small gesture, the automatic placement of an expensive object, made Rory feel the distance between where they'd started and where they'd each ended up as a physical thing, a pressure behind her sternum. "What are you drinking?" "Whatever's decent." Cecily looked along the row of bottles. "Actually — do you have Jameson?" Rory poured two measures without thinking, set one glass in front of Cecily and kept the other for herself. It was the drink they'd shared in Cecily's cramped student flat during their first week at Cardiff University, the only bottle on the shelf because Cecily's father had pressed it into her hand at the door as some patriarchal idea of a going-away gift. They'd drunk it without ice, sitting on the floor because there were no chairs yet, talking until two in the morning about things that felt, at eighteen, completely vital. Cecily looked at the glass. A recognition passed across her face, brief as a cloud shadow. "How are you?" she asked. The question carried more weight than its four syllables warranted — the barrister's trick of asking a simple thing and meaning a much larger one. "Grand." Rory leaned against the back counter. "You?" "Junior partner at Mercer Collins." Cecily lifted her glass. "Which means eleven-hour days and a very clean flat I'm never in." "Congratulations." "It sounds hollow when you say it like that." "I meant it." Cecily studied her. That was the thing about Cecily — she'd always looked at people the way she looked at case notes, separating fact from supposition. "You were the best in our year," she said. "Everyone knew it. Griffiths used to read your essays out loud." "Griffiths read everyone's essays out loud. He was a peacock." "He read yours to illustrate how to think." Cecily set her glass down. "And then you just stopped. We came back from Christmas break and you were gone. No explanation, no forwarding address. Your mother, when I rang her, said you'd moved to London for personal reasons and couldn't say more." "She wasn't wrong." The silence that followed had texture. Not uncomfortable, but dense with the things neither of them were saying — Cecily because she was choosing her moment, Rory because she'd spent three years constructing a careful architecture of not explaining herself and was reluctant to dismantle it for a Tuesday night. "Was it Evan?" Cecily said. The name hit differently than Rory expected. Not painfully — that particular nerve had scarred over — but with a dull, hollow resonance, like a key struck on a piano that hadn't been tuned in years. "How much did you know?" Rory asked. "Enough to be ashamed of how little I did." Cecily's jaw tightened. "I saw things. We all saw things. None of us said anything. We were twenty-two and stupid and I have thought about it a great many times since." Rory looked down at her glass. The amber of the Jameson caught the low light and held it. "You couldn't have done much," she said. "You'd be surprised what a well-placed word can do." "You're a barrister." "Yes. And I was a coward before that." Cecily turned the glass between her palms. "Where is he now?" "Still in Cardiff, far as I know. Maybe finished his degree by now." Rory shrugged, and it was a genuine one — she'd reached, some months ago, a point of actual indifference that she hadn't forced herself to perform. "I don't look him up." "Good." The word came out flat and hard. Then: "And you're happy? Here?" Rory looked around the Raven's Nest — the old maps pinned crookedly to the walls, the photographs of faces she'd learned to put names to, the green neon from the sign outside bleeding through the front window and painting everything the colour of shallow water. There was a crack in the ceiling above the optics she kept meaning to mention to Silas. The regulars at the far end were laughing at something, low and comfortable. "Yeah," she said. "I think I actually am." Cecily looked at her for a long moment. Not assessing now — something closer to uncertain, an expression Rory had rarely seen on her face in the years they'd shared tutorials and cramped library carrels and two-in-the-morning coffees that tasted of burnt milk. "I envied you," Cecily said. "When you went. I was furious first — at you for not telling me, at myself for not knowing why — but eventually it settled into something like envy." She smoothed the lapel of her coat, an unconscious gesture, private. "We were all so certain about what we wanted. And you just walked away from all of it. As if it were possible to do that." "It's possible." Rory picked up her glass. "It costs something." "What did it cost?" Rory thought of her mother's face the last time she'd seen it — at the door of the family house in Cardiff, composed in that particular way Jennifer Carter composed herself when she was frightened. She thought of her degree, half-finished and still technically enrolled somewhere in the university's system, a ghost bureaucracy she'd never properly dissolved. She thought of the person she'd been in that flat with Evan, the specific narrowing of herself she'd undergone across eighteen months, like a river slowly diverted into a smaller and smaller channel. "Enough," she said. "Not more than it was worth." Cecily nodded. She looked down at the bar, at the grain of the wood, as if something important were written there she was trying to read. "I passed my silk application last month," she said. "Everyone threw a party. I stood in the middle of it and thought —" She stopped. "What?" "That it looked exactly like I'd imagined it would when I was twenty-one." Her voice was perfectly even. "Which isn't the same as being what I wanted." The bar held its Tuesday quiet around them. Somewhere behind the wall, a pipe knocked once. One of the regulars called for another round. Rory refilled both glasses without being asked.