Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8WVZFJZ16ZSGXDYP7Q9H6S

The last of the regulars had gone at quarter past midnight. The Raven's Nest settled into itself the way old buildings do when the people leave — a slow exhalation, the creak of wood cooling, the refrigerators behind the bar suddenly audible. Silas moved through the quiet, upending chairs onto tables, collecting the last of the abandoned glasses. He didn't hear the door to the stairs open. "Couldn't sleep." Rory stood at the bottom of the staircase in an oversized grey jumper and jeans, her black hair loose around her jaw, feet bare on the flagstone floor. Not asking permission. Just explaining herself to the room, or to him, or to no one in particular. Silas set a glass down on the bar. "There's decaf. And there's whisky." "You know which one I want." He poured two fingers of Jameson into a lowball without being asked and slid it along the bar as she settled onto a stool. The green neon from the sign bled through the frosted window above the door and laid itself across one side of her face in pale cold light. She looked younger in it. Not young. Younger. There was a difference. She turned the glass without drinking, watching the amber tilt. "The maps," she said, nodding toward the wall. "Did you put those up or were they here when you bought the place?" "Some of both." Silas leaned against the back counter, arms folded loose across his chest. "The one over the fireplace was already here. The others I brought from Prague. Vienna. Cape Town." "Tourist habit." "Something like that." She looked at him then — properly looked, the way she'd been avoiding since she moved in three weeks prior, skimming past pleasantries and rent and the occasional borrowed corkscrew. The hazel of his eyes caught the same neon. The grey in his hair was more settled than she remembered it. More permanent. "You knew my father," she said. Not quite a question. Silas didn't move. "I did." "He mentioned you. Not often. Once, maybe twice, when I was pressing him about his London trips. He called you the Spymaster." A sound escaped her, not quite a laugh. "I thought it was a joke." "He found it amusing." Silas reached for his own glass, which had sat largely untouched for an hour. "He was a clever man, your father. Annoyingly so. Made it difficult to win an argument." "Yes." The word landed flat. She drank. He watched her jaw tighten around whatever she was deciding not to say next. "You came to Cardiff once," she said. "To the house. I was seventeen. My mum made a leg of lamb. You brought wine." "I remember." He did. A narrow Victorian terrace with a view of the bay in winter. Brendan Carter filling a doorway, laughing at something before the door was fully open. A girl at the top of the stairs in school uniform, pretending not to eavesdrop. Bright eyes and a sharper mind than she let on. "You asked me about the Lebanon." Rory looked up. "You'd said something at dinner and I'd looked it up." "You had colour-coded my errors. Three of them." "There were four. You conceded three." The silence between them rearranged itself. Silas moved along the bar to close the till, doing something with his hands because the conversation had taken a direction he hadn't planned for and he was managing the pace of his own response. "Your father told me you were going to read law," he said. "He was very proud." "He was very certain." She ran a thumb along the rim of her glass. "There's a difference." "And did you?" "Two years. Pre-Law. Cardiff." The bare facts of it assembled and discarded in the same breath. "I didn't finish." He hadn't known that. Brendan Carter had come to London twice more after that leg of lamb dinner, and they'd had their meetings and their habitual two large Scotches and Brendan had talked about his daughter only briefly, the way proud fathers do — assuming the future, describing it with the past-tense confidence of foregone conclusions. She was going to be brilliant. She was going to terrify courtrooms. She had four errors memorised already. "I didn't know," Silas said. "Why would you." Not cold. Just precise. "Your father and I lost touch after—" He stopped. "It's been some years." "He'll be fine," she said, reading something in the pause. "He and Mum are fine. Still in Cardiff. Still the same." A long beat. "We're not close. Not anymore." She said it the way you say a thing you've practised saying, smoothed down by repetition until it no longer caught on anything. Silas recognised the technique. "It wasn't the law," he said carefully. "That made you leave." Her chin lifted by perhaps half an inch. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the light as she turned the glass again. Old and pink and slight. He hadn't noticed it before. "There was someone," she said. "For two years there was someone, and then I left, and then I came here." Each sentence its own complete sentence. "Eva found me the flat. She said you were decent." "Eva Marchetti?" "You know her?" "London's a village." He gestured slightly. "She asked me to keep an eye out. I didn't realise who she meant." Rory set the glass down. Something moved across her face and then was gone, too fast to name. "She didn't tell me that." "She was worried." "I know she was worried." The edge of it was brief, and she visibly softened it. "Sorry." "No." The refrigerator hummed. A taxi outside on the wet street. Silas watched her look at the map from Prague — a 1960s city map, grid lines and density, the kind of thing that looked like code to an untrained eye. She studied it with the focused blankness of someone not actually seeing a map. "I used to know exactly what I was going to be," she said. "That sounds ridiculous now." "No it doesn't." "I had a plan. A very specific plan." Her voice stayed level, didn't break or soften, and that was worse somehow for what it revealed. "And I thought I was the kind of person who kept to plans." Silas looked at the photographs above the bar. A waterfront in Cape Town. His own younger face half-turned from a camera on a Beirut street, unposed, from before the bad years. The person in that photograph had plans too. Controlled exits and contingencies and a very specific idea of what he was moving toward. "Plans don't account for people," he said. "No." She picked up her glass again and drank the rest of it. "They don't." He reached for the bottle without her asking. Poured. She didn't object. "My father," she said. "Does he know? That you own this place. That I'm here." "I haven't spoken to him in four years." "Four years." Something worked its way through her expression, slowly, like light through water. "What happened?" Silas turned the signet ring on his right hand once, a habit so old he only noticed it in moments like this. "He made a decision I disagreed with. I made one he disagreed with. We were both correct and neither of us said so." Rory exhaled a short, dry sound. "That sounds exactly like him." "It sounds exactly like both of us." She looked at the ring. At his hands. At the photographs again. At him. "You both just let it go," she said. "The friendship. You just put it down." "It got heavy," he said. "Sometimes things get heavy enough and you put them down for a moment and the moment extends and then one day it's simply been four years." The quiet in the bar changed again. It had a texture now, something between them that was almost tender but not quite — too many sharp edges for tender, too much that was known without being said. She was the girl at the top of the stairs again and he was the man who'd been to Lebanon and he'd never come back with the wine after that last visit and she'd stopped asking her father questions. "You lost weight," he said, and immediately felt it was the wrong thing. She didn't flinch. "You got old." "Yes." A slow nod. "I did." Outside the green sign buzzed faintly. Rain had started somewhere in the last few minutes — the hiss of it on the pavement just audible through the windows. Rory pulled the hem of her jumper down over her wrist without seeming to, a gesture so practiced it had become almost invisible. "I think I can sleep now," she said. She slid off the stool and took the glass behind the bar without being asked and rinsed it at the small sink and set it on the rack the way someone does when they've decided to be useful even in small ways. "Goodnight, Silas." "Goodnight, Rory." She crossed the floor and went up the stairs. He listened to her feet on the treads, the door at the top, the silence after. He stood at the bar for a long time in the green light and the rain sound, and thought about Brendan Carter in a Cardiff doorway, laughing at something before the door was even fully open, and thought about four years that had become simply the length of the distance and had never collapsed back into something shorter. He turned the signet ring once more. Then he finished closing up.