AI The green neon sign buzzed like a trapped insect, casting a sickly glow over the damp pavement. Inside The Raven’s Nest, the air was thick with the smell of old wood, spilled beer, and the faint, ever-present hint of Silas’s cigar smoke. Rory sat at the far end of the bar, her back to the wall, a half-finished pint of bitter sweating on a coaster. She traced the crescent scar on her left wrist with her thumb, a nervous habit she’d never shaken.
Silas polished a glass with a slow, methodical rhythm, his silver signet ring catching the low light. His hazel eyes were fixed on nothing in particular, a sign he was turning something over in his mind. The limp was more pronounced tonight; the weather was changing.
The door opened, letting in a slice of cold, diesel-scented air and the murmur of Soho. A man stepped in, shrugging off a tailored overcoat. He was tall, with the kind of broad-shouldered frame that spoke of regular gym visits, not manual labour. His hair was expensively cut, a shade of dark blond that looked natural but probably wasn’t. He scanned the room, his gaze passing over the maps and photographs, the few other patrons, and landing on her.
Rory’s breath hitched. The glass in her hand felt suddenly precarious.
“Laila?”
The old nickname, the one only people from before ever used, sounded foreign in the dim quiet of the bar. It was him. Evan. Not her Evan, not the one with the quick smile and quicker temper who’d left bruises on her soul. This was Evan Pryce, her university boyfriend. The one before everything went wrong. The one she’d left in Cardiff without a word, vanishing into the London fog three years ago.
He walked towards her, his steps confident on the worn floorboards. He’d filled out. The boyish softness was gone , replaced by sharp angles and a calculated ease. He looked like a man who read quarterly reports for fun.
“Christ,” he said, stopping a few feet from her stool. A smile touched his lips, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were the same pale grey she remembered, but colder now, assessing. “I thought it was you. I was meeting a client at that dreadful gastropub down the street, saw the sign, thought I’d pop in for a proper drink. And here you are.”
“Here I am,” Rory said. Her voice was steady, a minor victory.
Silas had stopped polishing the glass. He was watching, his expression neutral, but his posture had shifted. He leaned his weight off his bad leg.
“Can I?” Evan gestured to the empty stool beside her.
“It’s a free country.”
He sat, draping his coat over his knees. He ordered a single malt, neat, specifying a brand Rory had only seen in magazines. Silas poured it without comment.
“You look…” Evan began, turning the glass in his hands. “Different.”
“So do you.”
“I suppose time does that.” He took a sip, savoured it. “I heard you’d moved to London. No one knew where, exactly. You just… disappeared.”
“I needed a change.”
“A change.” He let the word hang . “You were top of our cohort. Professor Davies said you were the best natural legal mind he’d seen in a decade. We all thought you’d be at a Magic Circle firm by now, billing a thousand an hour.”
Rory took a long pull of her bitter. It tasted of nothing. “Plans change.”
“Clearly.” His gaze swept over her, taking in her simple jeans, the worn leather jacket, the lack of any jewellery except for a cheap watch . “What do you do now?”
“This and that. I deliver food. For a restaurant.”
A beat of silence . Evan blinked, then a short, disbelieving laugh escaped him. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Rory—Laila—come on. With your brains? Delivering noodles?”
“It pays the rent. It’s honest.” She heard the defensiveness in her tone and hated it.
“Honest.” He repeated the word as if it were in a language he didn’t quite understand . “We were going to conquer the world, remember? You and me. Carter and Pryce. You’d take the bar, I’d go into corporate law, we’d buy that ridiculous house in Penarth with the sea view.”
“I remember.” She remembered other things too. The pressure, the constant competition, the way his ambition had started to feel like a cage. The slow, chilling realisation that his vision of their future had no room for her doubts, only her achievements.
“What happened?” His voice dropped, lost its performative edge. For a moment, he sounded like the boy she’d known, the one who’d shared notes with her in the library, who’d kissed her behind the Student Union building in the rain.
“Life happened, Evan. I realised I didn’t want that life.”
“What life? A successful one? A comfortable one?”
“Your version of it.” She met his eyes. “It felt like a costume I’d never fit into.”
He shook his head, looked down at his drink. “I looked for you, you know. After you left. Your dad was worried sick. Your mum… she wouldn’t speak to me. They thought I’d done something.”
Guilt, old and familiar , coiled in her gut. “I called them. Eventually. They know I’m safe.”
“But not why you left. Not really .” He leaned in closer, the scent of his cologne—something woody and expensive—overpowering the bar’s musk. “Was it me? Did I… push too hard?”
There it was. The unspoken thing that had hung between them for the last half-hour, for the three years of silence . The weight of his presumption, his possession, his certainties. It hadn’t been cruelty, not then. It had been a suffocating kind of love, a blueprint for happiness he’d drawn without consulting her.
“You didn’t mean to,” she said finally. “But yes. It was you. It was the whole… expectation. The path was set, and I realised I’d never chosen it. I was just walking it.”
He sat back as if she’d struck him. The confident facade cracked, revealing something raw and bewildered underneath. “I loved you. I thought we wanted the same things.”
“I thought I did too. Until I didn’t.”
“So you just ran. No discussion, no fight. You just vanished and left me to explain to everyone why the brilliant Aurora Carter had thrown it all away to become a… a courier.” The word was a sneer, and he seemed to regret it instantly. He ran a hand through his perfect hair. “Sorry. That was unfair.”
“It’s delivery person. And it’s not all I am.” She thought of Silas, of the hidden room behind the bookshelf, of the strange, shadowy world she was beginning to navigate . A world where her quick thinking mattered more than her degree classification. She said none of it.
“What are you, then?” The question was genuine, stripped of its earlier condescension.
“I’m still figuring that out.”
He finished his whisky in one go, signalled to Silas for another. Silas moved with deliberate slowness, his limp audible on the floorboards.
“I’m engaged,” Evan said abruptly, not looking at her . “Her name’s Chloe. She’s a solicitor at Harlow & Finch. We met on a merger. She’s… she’s ambitious. She knows what she wants.”
“Congratulations.” Rory meant it. The thought of him with someone else brought no jealousy, only a dull relief.
“It’s not like it was with us. It’s… easier. Less intense.” He accepted the fresh glass from Silas with a nod. “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if you’d stayed. If we’d tried to talk about it.”
“We’d have fought. I’d have left anyway. Just later, and with more scars.”
He glanced at her then, and his eyes flicked to the crescent on her wrist. A different scar, from a different time. “You seem harder,” he observed.
“I am.”
“Are you happy?”
The question hung in the air . Rory considered the flat above the bar, the smell of Yu-Fei’s cooking, the quiet understanding in Silas’s eyes, the freedom of her bike weaving through London traffic, the absolute absence of anyone’s blueprint for her life.
“I’m not unhappy,” she said. It was the most honest answer she could give.
Evan nodded, as if that was answer enough. He checked his watch , a sleek piece of titanium on his wrist. “I should go. Chloe’s expecting me.”
“Of course.”
He stood, shrugged back into his overcoat. He hesitated, then pulled a business card from his wallet and placed it on the bar beside her pint. “In case you ever… I don’t know. Decide to use that degree. Or just want a coffee. No expectations.”
Rory looked at the card. *Evan Pryce, Associate, Thorne & Barclay Solicitors.* An address in the City. It was a artifact from a life she’d abandoned.
“Take care of yourself, Laila.”
“You too, Evan.”
He gave her one last, long look, a mixture of nostalgia and a sadness that bordered on pity, then turned and walked out. The door swung shut behind him, cutting off the sound of the street.
Silas resumed his polishing. After a moment, he spoke, his voice a low rumble. “Old ghost?”
“Something like that.”
“He carries a heavy watch .”
Rory smiled faintly. She picked up the business card, held it for a second between her fingers, then tore it neatly in half and dropped the pieces into the ashtray. She finished her pint, the bitterness now a comfort on her tongue.
“Another?” Silas asked.
“No. I think I’m done for the night.”
She slid off the stool, the weight of the encounter settling on her shoulders—not as a burden, but as a confirmation . The past was a country she had left. The man she’d once loved was a stranger in a well-cut coat. And she, Aurora Carter, was here, in a dim bar in Soho, with a crescent scar on her wrist and a future that was entirely, terrifyingly, her own.