Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WPC3JK0QDWHF1WEZGKJ2X

The Tuesday crowd at the Raven's Nest was thin — three regulars at a corner table nursing their usual, a couple near the window sharing a bottle of something red they'd brought themselves, which Silas had noticed but hadn't bothered to challenge. Rory had claimed the second stool from the left with her pint of Guinness, still in her delivery jacket, the fabric carrying the cold of the evening and the faint smell of chip oil from three stops back on her route. Silas set a fresh glass under the tap without being asked. "Second one already?" she said. "First one's been empty for ten minutes." He slid it across. "You've been staring at the wall." She hadn't been staring at the wall. She'd been watching the old photograph above the optics — two men in what looked like Prague, winter coats, unsmiling — and wondering, not for the first time, which one was Silas. She had a theory. The door opened. Something shifted in the air the way it does when a room receives a person it wasn't expecting, some subtle recalibration of atmosphere that Rory felt before she turned her head. And then she turned her head. He was thinner. That was the first thing. Declan Farrow had always carried himself with the easy solidity of someone who played rugby on Saturdays and drank with confidence on Sundays, but the man who stood in the doorway of the Raven's Nest wore a suit that had been expensive once and now looked like a decision made by someone else. His hair was cropped close in a way that suggested a recent change rather than a preference. He scanned the room the way people do when they're not sure what they're looking for, and then his eyes found Rory and stopped. Three years. "Bloody hell," he said. Not loud. Almost to himself. She picked up her pint and took a slow sip. He crossed the room with his hands in his pockets, jacket straining at the shoulders — the suit was definitely too small now, or he was carrying tension everywhere. He stopped at the bar one stool apart and didn't presume to close the gap. "Aurora Carter." "Declan." She held his gaze. "You look terrible." Something crossed his face that wasn't quite a smile. He pulled out the stool and sat, flagged Silas with two fingers. Silas looked at Rory first — a thing she'd noticed he did often, this small habit of checking, reading — and she gave nothing away, so he moved to take the order. "Whiskey. Whatever's not blended." Silas produced the Talisker without comment and withdrew to the far end of the bar, where he was close enough to hear everything and made no effort to pretend otherwise. Declan wrapped both hands around the glass. He hadn't drunk yet. "You're working in Soho?" she said. "Holborn. Partner at Greaves and Lim now. Was." He paused. "Am. Still am." He picked up the glass and put it down without drinking. "We had a client dinner nearby. I left early." "Successful client dinner." "Enormously." Flat. "Rory." He said the name like it cost him something. "I heard you were in London." "Eva." "Obviously Eva." The couple near the window laughed at something. One of the regulars raised a hand at Silas. The bar breathed around them and they sat in the middle of it, not quite touching the evening. "I looked for you," Declan said. "After. When the news got around." She knew which news. She'd spent a year rebuilding herself around not talking about which news. "I moved." She turned her glass on the bar slowly. "I didn't want to be found." "I know. I just—" He exhaled and finally took the whiskey, a proper swallow. Set it down. "He was my friend too, Rory. Evan. Before everything. He was my friend and I didn't — I should've seen it." "You weren't in the flat." "I was at the stag do where he—" He stopped. "Declan." "I'm just saying I saw things. Small things. And I put them away because it was easier." The clock above the bar marked the silence. Silas cleaned a glass that was already clean. "You were twenty-two," she said finally. "We all were." "That's generous." "It's not generous. It's just true." She picked up her pint. "Generosity would be pretending it didn't happen. Pretending it didn't take me two years to figure out how to sleep without checking the lock three times." He flinched. Small, but she saw it. "Are you—" He caught himself. "That's a stupid question." "It is." She said it without heat. "I'm alright. Actually alright, which is different from saying it to make people feel better." She looked at him properly then, the way she hadn't since he'd walked in. He'd aged around the eyes in the particular way that wasn't sleep deprivation or drink — it was the ageing of someone who'd spent time with something they regretted. "What about you?" He turned the glass. "The partnership is good. On paper." "And off paper." "Married. Separated. Now not sure which." A short, humourless sound that might have been a laugh. "Claire. You never met Claire." "No." "She's better off. Probably." He looked at the bar surface. "I became very good at my job and stopped being any good at anything else. It happened slowly and then all at once and I didn't notice until she pointed it out from the doorway of our hallway with two suitcases." "When?" "Four months ago." He glanced up. "I've been telling people six weeks." She didn't say anything to that. Outside, a car horn cut through the double-glazed quiet of the Nest and faded. "You seem different," he said. Not accusatory. Something more careful. "I am different." "Good different?" She considered the question the way she did with real ones, took her time. Outside, the green neon threw its colour across the wet pavement. She'd lived above this bar for eight months now, had learned the particular groan of the pipes and the specific hour at which the last regulars left and Silas would lock up. She'd rebuilt something here, slowly, out of delivery shifts and Saturday mornings and evenings exactly like this one — unremarkable and steady. A life made of small things rather than the large ambitions she'd never wanted. "Yes," she said. "Good different." He nodded. Looked at his glass. "I don't know who I am anymore. Outside the job. I used to know." "We used to know a lot of things." She looked at the photograph above the optics again. "Turns out most of it was just certainty. Not the same as actually knowing." Quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you miss Cardiff?" She thought about the university library where they'd both spent whole winters over case law they hadn't cared about. The pub near her parents' house where everyone knew her name and her father's name and her mother's maiden name. The particular smallness of being entirely known. "Parts of it," she said. "Not enough to go back." Silas appeared at the far end of the bar and refilled her pint without being asked. She caught his eye and he looked away, unhurried, and she understood that this was his version of courtesy — presence without intrusion, the art of a man who'd spent his career learning the difference. Declan looked at the whiskey. "I should've called you," he said. "Properly. After you left." "You should've." She said it plainly, without resentment, because it was simply a fact they both held now. "But you're here." He looked up. "That's not absolution," she said. "In case that's what you were hoping." "No." He held her gaze. "No, I know." The corner table broke into a low argument about football scores. The couple by the window asked for the bill. Declan finished his whiskey and set the glass down at a careful distance, like a man deciding not to order another. "I should get back. They'll be doing the dessert course." "Of course." He reached for his wallet, but Silas was already shaking his head from the end of the bar. "On the house." First words he'd spoken in twenty minutes. Declan turned, looked at Silas with the slight confusion of someone encountering a generosity they hadn't earned. He pocketed the wallet. "Thank you." He stood. Put his jacket straight. Looked at Rory. "You look well. Actually well. I'm glad." She nodded. He left. The green neon caught him briefly through the glass as he passed outside and then he was gone into the Soho evening, thinning away into the crowd. Silas moved along the bar until he stood in front of her. Set both hands flat on the wood. "Old friend?" he said. "Something like that." She drank. "Someone I used to know."