AI The low hum of the refrigerator behind the bar was the loudest sound in the Raven’s Nest. Rory traced the condensation on her glass with a fingertip, the chill seeping into her skin. The afternoon light, weak and diffused, bled through the grimy Soho window, doing little to dispel the bar’s perpetual twilight. Silas was in the back, sorting through paperwork, his grey-streaked auburn hair a familiar , comforting sight. Rory had come down from her flat for a moment’s quiet before her evening delivery shift. The air here always smelled of old wood, stale beer, and something else, something indefinable that spoke of secrets kept and histories woven.
A gust of wind rattled the door. Rory didn’t look up until a shadow fell across the worn floorboards. It was a man, dressed in a suit that looked both expensive and slightly rumpled, as if he’d slept in it. He scanned the room, his gaze snagging on her. Recognition warred with disbelief. He paused, a hand hovering near the doorframe, before slowly approaching.
“Rory?” The voice was a question, tentative, like testing unfamiliar ice.
She blinked, the name a ghost from a life she’d carefully packed away. “Leo?”
He stopped a few feet from her table, his features sharper, thinner than she remembered. The easy smile that had once lit up his face seemed to have been filed down, leaving only a faint etching . His eyes, once a clear, bright grey, now held a perpetual tiredness, ringed with weariness that no amount of sleep could erase. His dark hair, which she recalled always tousled with youthful bravado, was neatly combed, thinning at the temples. He looked like a man who had been buffed and polished into something shiny but brittle.
“It is you,” he breathed, exhaling slowly . He ran a hand over his jaw, a gesture of self-consciousness. “I… wow. What are you doing here?”
Rory gestured to the empty chair opposite her, a ghost of her old ease returning. “I live upstairs. I work for Yu-Fei Cheung, deliver for him. Sometimes Silas lets me just… exist in the quiet before the rush.” She kept her voice level, betraying none of the sudden tremor in her stomach . This was not part of the plan, none of this life. Not Silas, not the deliveries, certainly not this bar that hummed with unspoken potential and unseen dangers. And definitely not running into ghosts from Cardiff.
Leo sank into the chair, his movements stiff. “Upstairs? Blimey. You always did gravitate towards the interesting places. I just came from a meeting near here. Feels like a lifetime since… well.” He trailed off, his gaze drifting around the dimly lit room, taking in the faded maps and sepia photographs. “Still the same, isn’t it?”
“Mostly,” Rory said, picking up her glass. “Silas likes it that way.”
“Silas?” The name seemed to surface from a half-forgotten memory. “The old bloke who used to play chess in the park?”
Rory’s lips twitched. “Something like that.” Silas was a retired intelligence operative, owner of this bar, and her reluctant mentor. He was also her landlord. It was a long, complicated story she didn’t have the energy to explain to Leo. “He… he owns the place.”
Leo nodded, a flicker of understanding, or perhaps just polite acknowledgement, passing through his eyes. “Right. So, delivering food now? I always thought you’d be… I don’t know. Queen’s Counsel by now, at least. You were always the sharpest.”
The compliment landed like a stone, heavy and out of place. Queen’s Counsel. Her father would have loved that. Her mother had probably dreamed of it. Rory had dutifully started Pre-Law at Cardiff, the weight of expectation pressing down until it had felt suffocating, until Evan’s shadow had made even that feel like a temporary reprieve. Then Eva had called. London. A new start. A life that wasn’t dictated by others’ plans. “Studies had to be put on hold,” she said, measuring her words . “Life took a different turn.” Just like that . ‘A different turn’. It sounded so bland, so unlike the precarious tightrope walk her life had become.
“Hold? That’s a shame,” Leo said, his voice lacking conviction . He hailed the bartending figure emerging from the back. “Drink? My treat.”
Rory shook her head. “I’m fine.”
“Whiskey. Double,” Leo called out, then turned back to Rory. “So. Cardiff. Do you ever go back?”
“No,” Rory said, a little too quickly . The crescent scar on her left wrist, usually hidden beneath her sleeve, felt suddenly warm. “Not for a long time. You?”
Leo waved a dismissing hand, his gaze fixed on the amber liquid Silas was pouring . His usual easy grace was gone, replaced by a kind of restless energy that seemed to fray the edges of his composure . “Once or twice. It’s… smaller than I remembered. Or maybe I’m just… bigger.” He accepted the drink from Silas, giving the older man a cursory nod. Silas met Rory’s eyes for a brief moment, a silent question or perhaps a shared observation, before returning to his work, his slight limp barely noticeable as he moved.
“Bigger how?” Rory prompted, curiosity and a strange, unwelcome nostalgia warring within her. Their university days had been a blur of late nights, shared dreams, terrible poetry, and the intoxicating belief that the world was theirs for the taking. Leo had been so full of fire, so utterly convinced he’d conquer everything.
Leo took a long swallow of whiskey, his Adam's apple bobbing convulsively. “Just… more complicated. More tied down. I’m a partner at Sterling & Thorne now.” He said it like an accusation.
Rory waited. Sterling & Thorne? It sounded impossibly grand, impossibly grim. “That’s… that’s amazing, Leo. I remember you always wanted that.”
He gave a short, barking laugh that held no humour. “Did I? Must have been the younger me. The one who thought climbing the ladder was the only way to prove you weren’t dead yet. It’s… it’s a lot of hours. A lot of depositions. A lot of people trying to screw other people over, and my job is to be the best at screwing them back.” He looked down at his hands, now curled around the heavy glass. They were manicured , but his knuckles were white. “My wife, Sarah , she left two years ago. Said I was married to the firm. She wasn’t wrong.”
The confession hung in the air , stark and raw. Rory felt a jolt . This was the Leo she had known? The vibrant, restless Leo who’d sworn he’d never be one of them, swallowed by the grey suits and the crushing routine? She remembered him arguing passionately against injustice, about to change the world with every fibre of his being. Now he looked like he’d been changed by it instead.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Leo,” she said, the words tasting like ashes. She remembered Sarah , bright and hopeful, at their graduation party.
“Don’t be,” he said, forcing a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He swirled his whiskey, the ice clinking like tiny, mournful bells. “It’s the life I built. Or let be built around me. You, though…” He looked at her, really looked at her, and for the first time, the weary gaze seemed to hold a spark of genuine intrigue , tinged with something that might have been envy. “You look… different. More… awake. Less worried about what everyone else thinks. Living above a bar in Soho. Delivering for a Chinese restaurant. It’s not exactly the path we talked about, is it?”
Rory felt a blush creep up her neck. Awake? Maybe. Or maybe just more aware of the precipice. “It’s… it’s kept me out of trouble,” she said, a wry twist to her lips. Silas’s world was far from safe, but it was honest in its danger, unlike the polite, legalised predation Leo described. “And it pays the bills.”
“The bills,” Leo echoed , looking at his own expensive watch as if measuring its cost . “Right. I remember bills. Now I just sign them. What about… Evan?”
The name hung heavy, a cold, sharp shard. Rory involuntary touched her left wrist, the small crescent scar a faint map of pain and escape. She pulled her hand away quickly , tucking it under the table. “He’s not part of my life anymore. I left Cardiff because of him. Came to London.”
“Eva found you?”
“She did. She always does.” Eva, her friend, the one who knew what Rory needed before Rory did.
Leo finished his whiskey in one gulp, then set the glass down with a thud. Silas had seen and was already moving with another. “Eva. Right. She was always the one with her head screwed on straight. Unlike me, I suppose.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Chasing dreams. Turns out some dreams are just nightmares in disguise. You’re lucky, Rory. You always were. You just didn’t know it. You had the courage to walk away from it all, from him, from that path. I just kept walking down the one I thought I was supposed to.”
He stared into his new drink, the dim light of the Raven’s Nest catching the lines etched around his eyes, the deep furrows on his brow. Rory watched him, seeing not just the man he was, but the ghost of the boy he’d been . They had stood on different precipices, their futures unwritten pages in the same worn notebook. She had chosen the unknown, the risky, the life that offered no guarantees but the chance to be truly free. He had chosen certainty, ambition, the polished veneer of success. And here they both were, years later, in a dimly lit Soho bar, grappling with the weight of the choices that had made them strangers to their younger selves. The quiet hum of the refrigerator seemed to grow louder, filling the space between them with all the words left unsaid, all the regrets unspoken , the vast, uncharted territories between who they had been and who they had become.