Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WK6QZSW4B4RF5JF78KS45

The Tuesday crowd at The Raven's Nest was thin enough to count on two hands. Rory balanced a crate of clean pint glasses against her hip and nudged the swinging door with her shoulder, stepping behind the bar where Silas was polishing the brass taps with a cloth that had seen better decades. "Last batch from the machine." She set the crate down with a clink. Silas didn't look up. "You're not on the clock." "And yet here I am. Carrying your glasses. Which, if you think about it, is really more of a commentary on my social life than my work ethic." The corner of his mouth twitched beneath his beard. He folded the cloth once, then again, and draped it over his shoulder. "There's a curry in the back. Yu-Fei sent it over." "Yu-Fei sends a curry every Tuesday. She thinks I'm wasting away." "You are wasting away." Rory opened her mouth to protest, then caught her reflection in the mirrored shelf behind the bottles — the sharp line of her jaw, the bruise-colored hollows under her eyes from three consecutive nights of broken sleep. She closed her mouth. Reached for an empty glass and poured herself a water from the tap instead. The door opened. Cold air swept through the Nest and curled around the legs of the barstools. A man stepped in, tall, rain-darkened coat hanging open over a charcoal suit that fit him like it had been cut by someone who charged by the stitch. He carried an umbrella — not a collapsible one, a proper full-length umbrella with a wooden handle — and he shook it once before leaning it against the wall near the door. He paused. Looked around. His gaze moved across the old maps pinned to the walls, the photographs yellowing in their frames, the green-tinged light that bled through the front window from the neon sign outside. His expression said he was deciding whether this was the kind of place where he belonged. Rory stacked the last glass on the shelf. Her hands stopped. He was different. The angles of his face had hardened into something architectural, all clean planes and deliberate symmetry. His hair, which she remembered as an unkempt mess perpetually falling into his eyes, was cropped close and swept back with product. He wore a watch that caught the low light — not flashy, but the kind of understated expensive that whispered rather than shouted. But it was him. She knew it was him before he'd taken five steps into the room, knew it from the way he tilted his head slightly left when surveying an unfamiliar space, a tic she'd catalogued a hundred times across library tables and lecture halls. Marcus Hale walked to the bar and sat down two stools from the end. He picked up the cardboard drink menu, scanned it without reading it, and set it down. "Whisky, neat. Whatever you'd recommend." Silas glanced at Rory. She hadn't moved. "Rory." She blinked. Reached for the Jameson — muscle memory, a small act of spite she didn't fully understand — and poured two fingers into a tumbler. She set it in front of him. Her hand was steady. That surprised her. Marcus picked up the glass, brought it halfway to his lips, and stopped. His eyes tracked from her hand to her wrist, where the sleeve of her jumper had ridden up to expose the pale crescent scar curving along the bone. "Aurora?" Nobody had called her that in two years. The name landed like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples went somewhere deep and private. "Marcus." He set the glass down without drinking. His mouth opened, closed. He looked at the bar top, at his own hands spread flat against the dark wood, and then back at her. Something rearranged itself behind his eyes. "You work here?" "I live upstairs. I help out sometimes." "In Soho." "In Soho." He processed this. She watched him do it — watched the calculations run behind the composed exterior, the quiet reassessment of every assumption he'd carried about her for however many years it had been. Four. She knew exactly how many. Four years, two months, and some irrelevant number of days since she'd last stood in the same room with Marcus Hale, which had been the student union bar on a Thursday evening in March, and she'd been wearing a green dress Evan picked out, and Marcus had been three pints deep and arguing about constitutional precedent with a postgrad named Sian. "I thought you were — " He stopped himself. "What?" "I don't know. Practicing. Somewhere. Your father's firm, maybe." Rory leaned against the back counter and folded her arms. "That was always more his plan than mine." Silas had migrated to the far end of the bar with the instincts of a man who'd spent decades reading rooms. He busied himself with inventory, but Rory caught the faint angle of his head, the way his hand paused over the bottle he was pretending to inspect. Listening. She didn't mind. Marcus finally drank. His jaw tightened at the Jameson — he'd always been a Scotch man, she remembered now, a pointless loyalty to his grandfather's tastes. He set the tumbler down and rotated it a quarter turn. "Four years." "About that." "You just vanished, Aurora. One day you were there and the next — " He shook his head. "I called. Eva said you'd moved but wouldn't say where. Your mum said the same. I figured you'd surface eventually. People do." "And here I am. Surfaced." "Behind a bar in Soho." The way he said it. Not cruel, not quite. But freighted with something — a disappointment that wasn't his to carry, an expectation she'd never agreed to fulfill. She recognized the tone. Her father wielded it like a scalpel. Marcus at least had the decency to look uncomfortable with it. "You look well," she said. "The suit's new." He glanced down at himself as if he'd forgotten what he was wearing. "Chambers took me on last year. Kirkmore and Associates." "Kirkmore." She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Criminal defense?" "Commercial litigation." "God, that's even worse." He smiled. A real one, sudden and unguarded, and for a half-second he was twenty-one again, slouched in a plastic chair at the union, gesturing with a stolen chip while dismantling somebody's argument about tort reform. The smile dissolved as fast as it had appeared, swallowed by the expensive suit and the careful posture. "What happened, Rory?" The name. Her name. The one that belonged to her, not to her parents' ambitions or Evan's possessive script. He'd remembered. She picked up a glass and dried it with a cloth, though it was already dry. "A lot of things happened." "Was it Evan?" Her hands went still. She folded the cloth. Unfolded it. Folded it again. "What makes you ask that?" Marcus stared at his whisky. "I saw something. At that party — the one at Davies' house second year. You came in late and you had this — you were holding your arm a certain way. Like you were protecting something. And Evan was right behind you with his hand on your back and you flinched when he touched you. Just barely. Just enough." The bar seemed smaller. The maps and photographs on the walls pressed inward. Rory became aware of her own breathing, the mechanical in-and-out of it, and she focused on keeping it even. "You never said anything." "No." "Why?" He turned the glass again. The amber liquid caught the light from the green neon bleeding through the window. "I told myself I wasn't sure. That I was reading into things. That you were smart enough to — " He stopped. Pressed his thumb against the rim of the glass. "I was a coward. That's the honest answer." Silas coughed quietly from the end of the bar. Not a real cough — a signal, an offer. Rory shook her head, a tiny motion meant only for him. He returned to his inventory. "You couldn't have known," she said. "Don't do that." "Do what?" "Let me off the hook. I saw what I saw and I told myself a comfortable story, and you disappeared, and I spent two years wondering if I could have — " He pressed his knuckles against the bar. The watch glinted. "I spent two years wondering." Rory set the cloth down. She came around from behind the bar and sat on the stool beside him. Close enough that she could smell his cologne, something cedar and deliberate, so far removed from the supermarket deodorant he used to drown himself in before lectures. She rested her forearms on the bar and studied the crescent scar on her wrist. A childhood bicycle accident. The only scar anyone could see. "I left him," she said. "That's the part that matters." "Is it?" "It has to be. Because the alternative is going back over every single moment and asking who should have done what, and I can't live there, Marcus. I'd drown." He was quiet. The rain picked up outside, drumming against the window. Someone at a corner table laughed at something on their phone, a bright sharp sound that didn't belong to this conversation. "You seem different," he said. "I am different." "No, I mean — " He turned on the stool to face her. "You seem more like yourself. More like whoever you were before, I don't know, before all of us got our hands on you. University, your father, Evan. You're sitting straighter." "I'm sitting on a barstool, Marcus." "You know what I mean." She did. She hated that she did. Because it meant he'd noticed back then, too — noticed the way she shrank, incremental, year by year, folding herself into smaller and more accommodating shapes. And if he'd noticed that, he'd noticed everything. The flinch at Davies' party wasn't a revelation. It was a confirmation. "I deliver food," she said. "For a Chinese restaurant around the corner. I make barely enough to cover rent. I have no savings, no career, and I haven't spoken to my father in eighteen months." She paused. "I also sleep through the night most weeks now, and I said no to something last Tuesday without apologizing for it. So. Swings and roundabouts." Marcus looked at her. Really looked, the way people looked when they'd set down the version of you they'd been carrying in their head and tried to see what was actually there. His eyes were glassy. He blinked it away. "I'm sorry." "For which part?" "All of it. The party. Not calling again after Eva stonewalled me. Sitting here in this suit being surprised that you're not what I expected." She reached over and picked up his whisky. Took a sip. The Jameson burned in a familiar way — her father's drink, and hers now too, reclaimed. "You're forgiven for the suit," she said. "The rest, we can work on." He exhaled. Something in his shoulders loosened, just a fraction, the careful architecture of his adult self yielding to the structural memory of who he'd been. He signaled to Silas. "Another, please. And whatever she's having." Silas limped over, that slight drag in his left leg barely perceptible unless you knew to look. He poured a second Jameson, set a fresh glass in front of Rory, and filled it without being asked. His hazel eyes moved between them with the quiet appraisal of a man who'd spent a career reading the distance between what people said and what they meant. He walked away without a word. Marcus picked up the fresh glass and held it out. Rory touched her tumbler to his. The clink was small and unambitious. "To surfacing," he said. She drank. Outside, the green neon sign buzzed and flickered against the rain. Inside, two people who'd known each other in a previous life sat close enough that their elbows nearly touched, wearing the years between like wet coats they hadn't yet decided to take off.