Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WEE054J5XJ84C5BRFR9XM

The rain had started around six and hadn't let up. Rory could still feel it in the damp of her jacket, the cold that had worked its way into her knuckles during the last three deliveries. She sat at the far end of the bar with a half-drunk pint of cider and the remnants of her shift clinging to her — the smell of Yu-Fei's black bean sauce in her hair, a spot of sweet chili on the cuff of her sleeve she kept picking at with her thumbnail. The Raven's Nest was quiet for a Thursday. Two men in rumpled suits occupied the booth beneath the old Ordnance Survey map of the Scottish Highlands, speaking in tones too low to carry. A woman Rory didn't recognize sat alone near the door reading something on her phone. Silas moved behind the bar with his particular economy of motion, the slight hitch in his left leg barely perceptible as he dried pint glasses with a cloth and set them in rows on the shelf. The green neon from the sign outside filtered through the frosted window and gave the rain on the glass a sickly, beautiful glow. Rory was watching that glow, thinking about nothing in particular — or, more precisely, thinking about how good it felt to think about nothing in particular — when the door opened and a woman stepped in, shaking an umbrella. It took Rory three full seconds to recognize her. Not because the woman looked so different, though she did, but because Rory's brain refused to process the information. The mind protects itself that way. It encounters something that belongs to a sealed compartment and it simply declines the delivery, returns it to sender. Rory stared for those three seconds the way you stare at a word you've read a thousand times that suddenly looks misspelled. Then Megan Hale looked up, and their eyes met, and every sealed compartment in Rory's chest cracked open at once. Megan's hair was shorter. That was the first concrete thing Rory registered. It had been long at Cardiff, brown and wild and always escaping whatever clip or band she'd used to pin it back during lectures. Now it was cropped close to her jaw, precision-cut, the kind of haircut that cost real money. She wore a charcoal coat over a wine-colored blouse, and there were small gold studs in her ears that caught the low bar light. Her face had thinned. Not from illness or deprivation but from the particular sharpening that happens to a person who has become exactly what they set out to become. Everything about her was deliberate, curated, finished. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Megan said, "Oh my God," and her voice — that voice, still threaded with the Valleys — cracked the word God right down the middle. "Meg," Rory said. She didn't stand up. Her legs had made that decision for her. Megan crossed the room in five steps, her heels marking the old floorboards. She stopped a foot away, umbrella still dripping. Up close, Rory could see the makeup, tasteful and minimal, and beneath it the faint lines around Megan's eyes that hadn't been there four years ago. They stared at each other in the particular silence of two people who have too much to say and no idea where any of it begins. "You're—" Megan started. "You're here. You're in London. I didn't— Eva told me you'd come to London, but she didn't say where, and I didn't—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I wasn't going to ask her. I thought you wouldn't want me to know." "Sit down," Rory said, because it seemed like the only safe sentence available. Megan sat. She set the umbrella against the bar and folded her hands on the countertop, and Rory noticed that her nails were painted a muted blush color, perfectly even. Megan had bitten her nails at university. Had bitten them down to nothing during exam weeks, during mock trials, during the long awful February when Rory had shown up to a study session with a bruise on her collarbone and said she'd walked into a door and Megan had looked at her and said nothing. Said absolutely nothing. Silas appeared with unhurried grace, setting a cardboard coaster in front of Megan and raising his eyebrows a fraction. "What can I get you?" "Gin and tonic, please. Hendrick's if you have it." "We do." He glanced at Rory. His hazel eyes held a question, but he didn't ask it. He turned away, his silver signet ring catching light as he reached for the bottle. "So," Megan said. She exhaled a laugh that wasn't a laugh. "Four years." "About that, yeah." "You look—" Megan's gaze traveled over Rory's delivery jacket, the chili stain, the damp black hair plastered to her temples. Whatever she'd been about to say, she rerouted. "You look well. Healthy." "I am." Rory took a sip of her cider. It was going warm. "What brings you to Soho?" "Conference. Human rights law, at King's College. I'm presenting tomorrow morning." Megan paused. "I'm at Thirty-Six Bedford Row now. Chambers. Took tenancy last year." "That's brilliant, Meg. Really." Rory meant it. She was surprised by how much she meant it, and equally surprised by how much it hurt — not because she wanted what Megan had, but because she could feel the shape of the life she'd been supposed to live pressing against her like a phantom limb. Silas set the gin and tonic down between them and moved off to attend to the men in the booth. Megan wrapped her fingers around the glass but didn't drink. "Your dad sent me a message when I got tenancy," Megan said carefully. "Brendan. He said congratulations. He said he was proud." Rory's stomach clenched. "That sounds like him." "Rory—" "Don't." The word came out harder than she'd intended. It sat between them on the bar like a stone. Megan looked down at her gin. Rory looked at the black-and-white photographs on the far wall — nameless faces from nameless decades, frozen in moments that no longer mattered to anyone alive. "I'm not doing law," Rory said, after a silence that felt like holding her breath underwater. "I work for a Chinese restaurant. Deliveries." "I know," Megan said quietly. "Eva told me that much. She told me you were—" She hesitated. "She said you were okay. That's the word she used. Okay." "I am okay." "Are you?" Rory turned on her stool to face Megan directly. The bright blue of her eyes met the cautious brown of Megan's, and she could see it all there — the guilt, the calculation, the rehearsed empathy of a woman who'd spent the last four years learning to argue other people's cases. Megan had always been good at that. Good at speaking for others. Just not good at speaking up when it actually counted. "I got out," Rory said. "That's more than okay. That's everything." Megan flinched. It was barely perceptible, just a tightening around the mouth, but Rory had studied that face through three years of lectures and late-night cramming sessions and rain-soaked walks along the Taff. She knew every tell. "I should have said something," Megan said. "That night at the library. When you had the—when I saw the bruise. I should have said something, Rory. I've thought about it every day. I have literally thought about it every single day for four years." "Meg—" "No, let me. Please. I need to say it to your face because I've said it to every therapist and every empty room and every version of you that I've built in my head, and none of that counts. I saw it, and I knew, and I said nothing because I was afraid you'd stop being my friend. That's the truth. That's the whole pathetic sum of it. I chose keeping you over helping you, and then I lost you anyway." The words landed soft and precise, like the closing argument they were. Megan's eyes had gone glassy. She still hadn't touched her drink. Rory felt something give way in her chest — not a breaking but an unclenching, like a fist that had been closed so long the fingers had forgotten any other shape. She looked down at her left wrist, at the small crescent-shaped scar that had nothing to do with Evan, that was just a stupid childhood accident, a broken bottle in the garden when she was seven. But it sat there on her skin like a reminder that she'd been collecting marks from the world long before she understood that some of them were chosen for her and some she walked into on her own. "I wasn't ready to hear it," Rory said. "Even if you'd said it. I would have denied it. I would have cut you out even faster." "You don't know that." "I do know that, because that's exactly what I did to my mother when she tried." Megan pressed her lips together. A tear escaped her left eye and she caught it quickly with the back of her hand, almost professionally, the gesture of someone who had learned to cry efficiently. "You became a human rights barrister," Rory said. "Was that— is that because of me?" Megan let out a breath that shuddered. "Not everything is about you, Carter." Rory almost smiled. Almost. The old joke, the old name. Megan had always called her Carter in exasperated moments, the way you swat someone affectionately with a rolled-up newspaper. "Some of it, though," Megan admitted. "Some of it is about not standing there next time. About having the—" She gestured vaguely. "The structure. The authority. So it's not just me and my useless words." "Your words were never useless." "They were that night." "You didn't have any that night. That's different." They sat with that distinction for a long moment. The rain pattered against the window. One of the suited men laughed at something, the sound incongruously bright. Silas returned to his station behind the bar and began polishing the wood with slow, circular strokes, his face composed in the careful neutrality of a man who had spent decades pretending not to hear things. Megan finally lifted her gin and took a long drink. She set it down and turned the glass in her fingers, studying the lime. "Do you ever think about finishing?" she asked. "The degree?" "No." "Your dad—" "My dad can want what he wants. I spent twenty-one years trying to be the thing he wanted, and it almost killed me. Not the degree. The being a thing for someone." Rory heard her own voice and recognized the edge in it, the one she kept honed and hidden, and she pulled back. "I'm not angry at you, Meg. I haven't been angry at you in a long time." "That might be worse," Megan said softly. "Because you'd rather I was furious? Because then at least it would mean I'd been thinking about you?" Megan's jaw tightened. "Something like that." "I have thought about you. Not every day. But enough." Rory turned her cider glass in her hands, mirroring Megan's gesture without meaning to. "I thought about calling. After I got settled here. Eva kept saying I should." "Why didn't you?" "Because you belong to before. And I needed before to stay behind me." The sentence hung in the air between them, and Rory watched Megan receive it — watched the understanding arrive and then the hurt that followed it, one-two, like a doctor's reflex test. Megan nodded slowly. She traced a line of condensation down the side of her glass. "And now?" Megan asked. "Now that I'm sitting here, in your present tense?" Rory considered this. She looked around the Raven's Nest — the old maps with their faded borders, the photographs of strangers, Silas moving through his quiet rituals, the green neon rain on the glass. This was her world now. Small and specific and chosen. Not inherited, not endured, not performed for anyone's approval. "Now you're here," Rory said. "And I'm not who I was, and you're not who you were, and maybe that's the only way we were ever going to do this." Megan looked at her for a long time. Then she reached across the bar and placed her hand beside Rory's — not touching, just near, close enough to feel the warmth. An offering that made no demands. "I'm presenting at nine tomorrow," Megan said. "Domestic coercive control in cross-jurisdictional asylum cases." "Christ, Meg." "I know." "That's—" Rory shook her head. "That's enormous." "It's a twenty-minute slot in a room full of people looking at their phones." "It's not." Megan smiled, and for a moment Rory could see the old Megan underneath the tailoring and the precision haircut — the girl who'd eaten cold chips on the library stairs and argued passionately that the Human Rights Act was a living document, who'd once cried during a moot court exercise because she'd felt too much for her hypothetical client. That girl was still in there, buried under competence and composure, the way a river runs beneath a city. "Can I—" Megan stopped. Started again. "Can I have your number? Or is that too much before in your present tense?" Rory reached for a napkin from the dispenser. She patted her jacket until she found a pen — the one she used for marking delivery tickets — and wrote her number in quick, angled figures. She slid it across the bar. "If I don't answer right away, I'm probably on a delivery. Yu-Fei doesn't like us on our phones." Megan picked up the napkin and held it as though it were something fragile and improbable, a letter recovered from a shipwreck. She folded it carefully and slipped it into her coat pocket. They sat for another hour. They did not talk about Evan. They did not talk about Brendan Carter or the life Rory might have led. They talked about small things — Megan's flat in Holborn, the particular madness of London rent, a terrible film they'd both somehow watched independently. They talked the way you walk across a frozen lake, testing each step, aware of the dark water that lay beneath every surface. When Megan finally stood to leave, she buttoned her coat and picked up her umbrella and paused with her hand on the back of the stool. "I'm glad you got out," she said. "I need you to know that. Whatever else I failed at — I'm glad you got out." "I know," Rory said. Megan turned and walked to the door. She stopped beneath the frame, opened her umbrella, and stepped into the rain, and the door swung shut behind her and settled with a click. Silas appeared at Rory's elbow, collecting Megan's empty glass. He wiped the ring of moisture it had left on the bar. He did not look at Rory directly, but he set a fresh cider in front of her, unasked. "Old friend?" he said, in the mild tone of a man commenting on the weather. "Yeah." Rory wrapped her hands around the cold glass. "From before." Silas nodded, as if this explained everything, and limped back to his station. The neon sign buzzed outside, painting its green light across the wet street, and somewhere out there Megan Hale was walking through the rain with a napkin in her pocket, carrying a phone number she might or might not use, and the terrifying, tender knowledge that some distances survive being closed. Rory drank her cider and watched the rain and let the silence fill the space where all those years had been.