AI The green neon sign buzzed a faint electric hymn into the damp Soho evening. Inside The Raven's Nest, the air was thick with the scent of old wood, polish, and the faint, ever-present ghost of cigarette smoke from decades past. Rory wiped down the mahogany bar with a practiced, circular motion. Silas was in the back, inventorying spirits; the soft clink of bottles was the only sound besides the low hum of the refrigeration unit.
She wasn't on the clock, not really . The delivery shift for Yu-Fei had ended hours ago. But the flat above the bar felt too quiet, and the rhythmic work of cleaning was a comfort. It let her mind go blank, a state she cultivated. Her left wrist, where the small crescent scar whitened against her skin, brushed against the damp rag.
The door opened, slicing a wedge of sodium-lit street into the dimness. A man stepped in, letting the door sigh shut behind him. He was tall, shoulders broad in a well-cut wool coat, his hair shorter than she remembered, the dark blond now threaded with early grey at the temples. He scanned the room, his gaze sliding over the framed maps and the empty booths before landing on her.
Rory’s hand stilled on the bar. The cloth dripped a single, dark spot onto the wood.
“Laila?”
The name hit the quiet room like a stone dropped in a still pond. It had been years since anyone had called her that. It belonged to Cardiff, to university libraries and too-sweet cider and a girl who wore her heart like a badge. The man took a step closer, his face shifting from polite curiosity to stunned recognition.
“Christ. It is you.”
Rory set the rag down slowly . She could feel the cool, steady weight of Silas’s signet ring against a shelf below the bar, a signal he was listening from the doorway to the back. She didn’t look.
“Leo,” she said. Her voice was steady, a flat surface. “Leo Brennan.”
A laugh escaped him, short and disbelieving. He closed the distance, stopping a few feet from the bar. He didn’t try to hug her. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing in London? And here?” His eyes took in the bar, her simple jeans and t-shirt, the rag on the counter. The unasked question hung between them: *What are you doing * here *like this?*
“I live here,” she said. “Well, above here. I work deliveries. For a restaurant.” She offered no more . “You?”
“Law,” he said, as if it were obvious. And it was. Leo Brennan, first in their class, the one with the five-year plan etched in stone. “I’m with a firm in the City. Over for a client dinner.” He gestured vaguely toward the door. “Saw the sign. Thought I’d pop in for a whiskey before the train back to… well. My place is in Kensington now.”
He said it without boast, a simple statement of fact, but it delineated the space between them as clearly as the bar top. Kensington. Deliveries.
“Can I get you that whiskey?” she asked, turning to the shelves. Her movements were automatic, her back to him.
“Please. A single malt. Whatever you recommend.”
She chose a mid-range Speyside, poured two fingers into a clean glass. When she turned back, he had shrugged off his coat and was sitting on a stool. He looked older. Not just the grey. His face had lost the soft, eager openness she remembered. It was leaner, sharper, the lines around his eyes etched by stress or late nights or both. But his eyes, a warm hazel, were the same, and they were fixed on her with an intensity that felt like a physical touch .
“You disappeared,” he said, quietly, as she set the glass before him. “After… after everything with Evan. No one knew where you went. Your parents were frantic. Well, your dad was. Your mum was just… quiet.”
Rory leaned against the back counter, crossing her arms. The crescent scar on her wrist faced upward, a pale moon. “I needed to go.”
“I know. I know you did.” He took a sip of the whiskey, his eyes closing briefly in appreciation. “This is good.” He opened them again. “I looked for you. For a while.”
“Why?”
The question, blunt and stripped bare, seemed to surprise him. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass. “Because you were my friend. Because what he did… what was happening… I should have seen it sooner. I should have done something.”
There it was. The unspoken thing, the rot at the root of their severed past. Leo had been there, in the same social orbit. He’d seen Evan’s charm , his possessiveness disguised as devotion. He’d been one of the people Rory had slowly , systematically been isolated from.
“You couldn’t have known,” she said, and it was true, but the words were empty, a ritual absolution she offered because it was expected.
“I should have.” He set the glass down with a sharp click. “I was so wrapped up in internships, in moot court, in climbing the ladder. I saw the changes in you. You stopped arguing in seminars. You stopped coming to the pub. You became… smaller. I told myself you were just focused, that Evan was supportive. I was a coward.”
The confession hung in the air , raw and uncomfortable. Rory said nothing. She remembered the Leo of before: ambitious, yes, but with a ready laugh, the one who’d quiz her on tort law in the common room, who’d shared her disdain for their more pompous professors. The man before her carried a different weight .
“You’ve changed,” he said, echoing her thoughts.
“Haven’t we all.”
“Not like this.” He gestured at her, a swift, encompassing motion. “You’re… you’re calm. You were always clever, but it was a nervous energy, like a bird trapped in a room. Now you’re still. It’s unnerving.”
“Life outside a gilded cage is less frantic,” she said, and immediately regretted the bitterness that seeped into her tone.
He flinched. “Is that what we were? A cage?”
“My life was.” She uncrossed her arms, picked up the rag again, needing to do something with her hands. “Pre-Law, the right friends, the right boyfriend. It was a script. I was just reading lines.”
“And now? Delivering noodles is better?”
It wasn’t malice in his voice, but a genuine, baffled curiosity. The question laid bare the canyon between their understandings of the world. For him, success was a trajectory, a destination like Kensington. For her, success was a locked door at night, silence , and the absence of fear.
“It’s honest,” she said finally. “And it’s mine. No one owns it. No one owns me.”
Leo absorbed this, his gaze dropping to his hands. He still had the long, elegant fingers she remembered, but now a platinum band encircled the fourth finger of his left hand. She hadn’t noticed it before.
“You’re married,” she said.
He looked at the ring as if surprised to see it there. “Yes. Two years. Her name is Clara. She’s a pediatrician.”
“Congratulations.”
“It’s… it’s good. It’s stable.” He said the word like a mantra. “She doesn’t know about… about all that. About Cardiff. I’ve parceled that life off. A different Leo.”
“We all do that, don’t we?” Rory’s voice was soft. “Create compartments. The person we were, the person we are. The trick is not letting the old ones leak.”
“Do they? Leak?”
She thought of Evan’s face sometimes, flashing in a crowd. The way a raised voice could still make her heart stutter. The careful way she mapped exits in every room. “Sometimes,” she admitted.
They lapsed into silence . The clock above the bar ticked, measuring the seconds they had lost. Leo finished his whiskey.
“I think about that last time I saw you,” he said, not looking at her . “It was at the graduation party. Evan had his arm around you, so tight it looked like he was holding you up. You smiled, but it didn’t reach your eyes. I raised a glass to you from across the room. You didn’t see me. I got very drunk that night. I told myself I was celebrating.”
Rory remembered that night . The pressure of Evan’s grip on her arm, a warning disguised as affection . The blur of faces. The feeling of being a ghost at her own feast. She had seen Leo. She had seen his raised glass, his smile. She had looked away.
“I saw you,” she whispered.
He looked up, his eyes bright with a pain that was years old but undimmed. “Why didn’t you say anything? To me? To anyone?”
“What would I have said? ‘My boyfriend is a monster. Please save me.’? You were all so impressed by him. He had that way. He made my paranoia seem like… fragility.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t your job to save me, Leo. It was my job to leave. And I did.”
“But you left everything. Your degree, your friends… me.”
There it was, the core of the regret, not just for what happened, but for what was lost between them . A friendship that might have been a lifeline, severed by circumstance and fear.
“I had to,” she repeated, the only truth she had.
He nodded, accepting the finality of it. He pulled out his wallet, placed a twenty-pound note on the bar. “For the drink.”
“It’s on the house.”
“Please. Let me.”
She didn’t argue. He stood, shrugging his coat back on. He looked like a stranger again, a successful man in a fine coat, out of place in the shadowy nest of her world.
“It was good to see you, Laila,” he said, the old name a soft farewell.
“Rory,” she corrected gently . “It’s Rory now.”
“Rory.” He tested the name. It seemed to fit her better, he thought. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too, Leo. Give my best to Clara.”
He offered a small, sad smile that was more a memory of his old grin, then turned and walked to the door. The green neon light washed over him for an instant as he stepped out into the night, and then he was gone , absorbed by the city.
Rory stood behind the bar, the silence settling back around her. She picked up the twenty-pound note, smoothed it flat, and tucked it into the till. From the doorway to the back room, Silas’s slight limp was audible as he approached.
“Old friend?” he asked, his voice a low rumble .
“Something like that,” she said. She picked up the damp rag again, the familiar texture rough against her palm, and went back to wiping down the bar, erasing the faint water rings and the ghost of a conversation that had opened doors to rooms she’d tried to seal shut forever.