Run: 2026-02-24-01KJ8X90VJRRK1QERKRD10MBH3

The green neon from outside bled through the window in long, wet ribbons across the floor of The Raven's Nest, and Rory sat at the bar nursing a gin she hadn't asked for but hadn't refused, watching the ice melt. Silas had poured it without ceremony twenty minutes ago, set it down in front of her, and said nothing — which was his particular fluency, the language of a man who had spent decades listening more than he spoke. She appreciated that about him. She'd appreciated that about very few people in her life. It was a Tuesday, which meant the bar was mostly empty. A couple near the window shared a bottle of Rioja and the private grammar of people who had been together long enough to need very few words. An older man at the far end of the bar read a paperback, turning pages with the mechanical patience of someone who had nowhere else to be. The photographs on the walls — all those anonymous black-and-white faces, all those unnamed cities — watched the room with the indifference of the long dead. Rory had stopped noticing them weeks ago. They were wallpaper now. London had a way of making everything wallpaper eventually. She was thinking about nothing in particular, or trying to, when the door opened and brought the night in with it — the smell of rain and diesel and the faint, sweet rot of Soho — and then came the heels on the hardwood floor, confident, practised, the sound of someone who had learned to walk that way deliberately, and Rory turned her head out of habit, the low-grade alertness she'd developed these past months without quite meaning to. The woman who stepped in from the cold was shaking rain from an umbrella that had clearly lost the argument. Dark red coat, tailored. Hair pulled tight at the nape of her neck. She was scanning the room the way people scan a room when they only want a quiet corner and a stiff drink, not company, and then her eyes reached the bar and stopped. Rory felt the recognition land in her chest like something dropped from a height. Niamh Walsh. Three years. Three years and seven months, if she was being honest with herself, and she usually wasn't. Niamh looked exactly like herself, which was somehow the most disorienting thing — the same sharp jaw, the same way of standing with her weight on her left hip, the same furrow between her brows that appeared whenever she was deciding something. Only the coat was different. The coat was new. Everything else was Niamh as she had always been, as if time had moved around her rather than through her. "Aurora Carter," Niamh said, from across the room, and there it was — the name, her full name, the one she'd stopped hearing — and it sat in the air between them like a dropped glass, not yet broken. Silas, behind the bar, went very still in the way he went still when something in the room shifted. He didn't look up from the glass he was polishing. But he went still. "Niamh." Rory's voice was steadier than she'd expected. Niamh crossed the floor and stopped at the bar, one stool between them, not sitting. Her eyes moved over Rory slowly, the way eyes move over a room you used to know, recalibrating. "What are you doing in London?" "I live here." "Since when?" "Since I left Cardiff." Rory picked up her gin. "You're not a detective." Something flickered across Niamh's face — not quite hurt, more like the memory of it. She unbuttoned her coat and sat down on the stool, folding the umbrella across her lap. She looked at the bar as if the question of whether to order a drink was actually a question about something else entirely. Silas materialised, quiet and unhurried, and she ordered a whiskey without looking at him, adding please the way people do when they're being careful about themselves. "I'm here for an interview," Niamh said. "Denholm and Cross. Off the Strand." She let a small, complicated pause go by. "I'm being made a junior partner." "Congratulations." Rory meant it. She was surprised to find that she did. "You could have— " Niamh stopped herself. Started again, differently. "I didn't know what happened to you. After you left. Eva said you needed time." "Eva was right." "Eva's always right." There was no bitterness in it. They'd both grown up knowing that. Niamh wrapped both hands around the whiskey glass Silas set in front of her, though she didn't drink. "I thought about calling. Dozens of times. I never did." "I know." "Do you." Rory turned the crescent scar on her left wrist toward the bar and rested it there, a habit she'd developed without meaning to, as if the scar needed to touch things to remind her it was part of her. "I wasn't reachable," she said. "Not for a while. That wasn't about you." Niamh looked at the photographs on the wall. Rory watched her look at them. It occurred to her that this was what Niamh did in difficult moments — found something to study, something that demanded no reciprocity. She'd done it during torts lectures. She'd done it the night in their second year when Rory had cried in her kitchen for reasons she hadn't explained and Niamh had sat across from her and said nothing and heated soup and that had somehow been exactly right. "I heard about Evan," Niamh said, still looking at the wall. "Heard what." "That it wasn't good." A pause. "From his cousin. Last year, at some thing." Rory nodded, once, slowly. There was nothing to add. It wasn't good was a reduction so total it was almost funny. She'd thought, when she first arrived in London, smelling of the train and clutching Eva's address on a piece of paper, that she'd feel more like herself once she got some distance. She hadn't counted on the distance from herself. She was still calibrating, even now. She was still learning what was hers. "Are you happy?" Niamh asked. She'd finally turned to look at Rory directly, and there was something nakedly earnest in her face that Rory remembered from years ago, from before they'd both acquired the armour of education and ambition and disappointment. The Niamh who had once stayed up until four in the morning debating whether justice was procedural or substantive because she'd actually cared about the answer, not the grade. Rory considered the question seriously. She considered the restaurant deliveries she did mornings and evenings, the cold and the rain, the particular satisfaction of the city moving under her on a bicycle with nowhere to be but forward. She considered the flat upstairs with its slanted ceiling and the pipes that knocked in winter and the window that faced the wrong direction for sunlight but the right direction for watching the street come alive in the early hours. She considered Silas, who had taken her in the way people take in strays — not with pity but with the practical generosity of someone who has learned that the world runs on small, unremarkable acts of decency. "Not yet," she said. "But I think I'm learning the right things." Niamh nodded. She looked like she wanted to say something else and was choosing not to, which was its own kind of maturity. She drank her whiskey instead, and Rory drank her gin, and they sat in the particular silence of people who had once been essential to each other and were now something more ambiguous — not strangers, not quite still friends, but bound by the specific intimacy of shared time, of having known the same version of a city and a decade that no longer existed. After a while, Silas refilled both glasses without being asked. He exchanged no look with Rory. He turned back to his glasses and his quiet and his own long thoughts. "I looked for you online," Niamh admitted. "A few months ago. You'd disappeared." "I know." Rory smiled, a small one. "I deleted things." "Your whole degree. Your entire plan. Just — gone." Niamh turned the glass in her hands. "I used to envy how brave that looked." "It didn't feel brave." "What did it feel like?" Rory thought of the night she'd left — the suitcase she'd had to borrow from Eva because she hadn't owned one, the strange lightness of carrying only what mattered, the train pulling out of Cardiff Central while it rained, which it always was, while the city she'd grown up knowing drew back like something deciding to let her go. She thought of how the fear and the relief had been indistinguishable from each other, two hands pressing on the same door. "It felt like running," she said. "For a long time, that's all it felt like." Niamh absorbed that. She absorbed it the way Niamh absorbed most things — completely, without argument, making room for it. "And now?" she asked. The neon green from outside had shifted with the cloud cover, and the bar wore it differently, the maps on the walls lit in cool, uncertain light. The couple by the window were leaving, pulling coats on, laughing at something, and the man at the end of the bar had turned his paperback over and was looking at nothing, resting in the comfortable vacancy of someone whose inner life was sufficient. The Raven's Nest settled around them all like a held breath. "Now," Rory said, "I'm just here." It wasn't enough. It wasn't the answer Niamh deserved after three years and seven months and all those calls she'd never made and all the ones Rory had never returned. But Niamh was a lawyer, and a good one — she understood that sometimes the evidence was incomplete and you built what case you could from what you had, and she understood that some things between people resolved not through honesty but through proximity, through the willingness to simply sit together again with your drinks and your separate wounds and see what the silence made room for. She stayed another hour. They talked — about Eva, who was apparently planning a wedding; about a lecturer they'd both despised and both secretly learned the most from; about the rain, which was London's constant editorial comment on everything. They didn't talk about Evan. They didn't talk about the law firm waiting for Rory if she'd stayed, the trajectory that had been laid out like a road she'd been walking before she'd realised she could step off it. Some things were more usefully left as the shape of their absence. When Niamh finally stood to go, she left a business card on the bar. She slid it across without comment, didn't ask Rory to take it, didn't make it into a moment. Just left it there, white and precise, with the firm's name in small black letters. "Don't disappear again," she said. "I live here," Rory said. Niamh put her coat on. She picked up the broken umbrella and looked at it with mild resignation. At the door, she turned. She didn't wave — she never had been a person who waved — but she looked at Rory for a moment in the specific way of someone committing a face to memory, and then she was gone, and the door closed, and the sound of her heels faded into the wet street. Rory sat very still. Silas moved along the bar without urgency and collected Niamh's empty glass. He didn't speak. He had the gift — rare and learned, she imagined, the hard way — of understanding the difference between comfort and intrusion. She picked up the business card. Set it down. Left it there on the wood like a question she hadn't decided yet whether to answer. Outside, the green neon buzzed softly against the rain.