Run: 2026-03-15-01KKS36M9YN8PJFPNVHZVR3ZQX

The Raven's Nest smelled of wood polish and spilled whisky. Rory sat at the far end of the bar, a half-finished pint settling warm in her stomach, watching Silas wipe down glasses behind the counter. The green neon sign outside flickered against the window, casting strange shadows across the old maps on the walls. She'd come down to escape the silence of her flat. The walls up there had started closing in around four o'clock, and she'd needed noise, movement, the low murmur of strangers who expected nothing from her. The door swung open. A woman stepped inside, shaking rain from her jacket, and Rory's hand stopped halfway to her glass. Hannah Mercer. Five years, maybe six since Cardiff. She'd filled out since university, her face sharper, her dark hair cut into a severe bob that framed cheekbones Rory didn't recognise. She wore a grey blazer over a black turtleneck, the kind of outfit that cost more than Rory made in a month delivering Yu-Fei's noodles across Soho. Hannah scanned the room, her gaze passing over Rory twice before something clicked behind her eyes. "No way." Rory set down her pint. "Hannah." "Rory Carter. As I live and breathe." Hannah crossed the room, her heeled boots clicking against the floorboards, and pulled out the stool next to her. "I thought you'd fallen off the edge of the earth." "Just London." "Just London, she says. Like it's nothing." Hannah flagged down Silas, who approached with the measured pace of a man who'd seen every type of reunion play out in his bar. "Gin and tonic. Double. And whatever she's having." "I'm fine." "Two pints, then." Hannah turned back to her, studying Rory's face with the same intensity she'd once used to dissect case law. "You look good." The lie hung between them. Rory knew what she looked like: tired, thinner than she should be, the crescent scar on her wrist visible where her sleeve had ridden up. She tugged the fabric down. "You look like a solicitor." "Barrister, actually. Took pupillage last year. Chambers in Lincoln's Inn." "Of course you did." Hannah's mouth twitched. "What's that supposed to mean?" "Nothing." Rory picked up her pint, took a long drink. "Congratulations." "You didn't finish." "No." "Your dad would've—" "Don't." The word came out harder than Rory intended. Silas set down their drinks without comment and retreated to the far end of the bar, polishing a glass with the专注 of a man who knew when to make himself scarce. Hannah wrapped both hands around her gin glass. The signet ring Rory remembered from third year, a cheap silver thing Hannah's grandmother had given her, was gone. In its place, something gold and tasteful caught the light. "I heard about Evan," Hannah said quietly. Rory's jaw tightened. "Did you." "From Emma. She said you left Cardiff without telling anyone." "Emma talks too much." "She was worried." "Was she." Rory stared at the row of bottles behind the bar, at the amber liquids catching the dim light. "Funny how worried everyone gets after the fact." "I didn't know. You have to believe that, Rory. If I'd known what he was—" "You came to the flat once. Remember? That dinner party where he made that comment about my weight and everyone laughed." Hannah's face went pale. "I didn't think—" "No. You didn't." Rory finally looked at her. "Neither did I. For a long time." The silence stretched. Somewhere in the bar, a glass clinked against a table. The rain had started again, drumming against the windows. "I'm sorry." Hannah's voice had lost its polished edge. "I should have seen it. I should have said something." "It wouldn't have mattered." "How can you know that?" "Because you didn't know me. Not really." Rory traced a water ring on the bar with her fingernail. "We studied together. We got pissed together on Fridays. But you didn't know that I was already pulling away from everything before Evan even happened. You didn't know I was drowning in a degree I hated because my father demanded it. You didn't know anything that actually mattered." "That's not fair." "Isn't it?" Hannah took a long drink of her gin. When she set it down, her hand trembled slightly. "I missed you. After you left, I kept thinking you'd come back. That you'd finish your degree, that we'd go through pupillage together like we planned." "We planned that when we were twenty. I'm not twenty anymore." "Neither am I." Rory looked at her then, really looked, and saw something beneath the expensive clothes and the successful career. Fine lines around the eyes. A tension in the shoulders that spoke of long hours and longer nights. The particular stillness of someone who'd built a life that looked exactly like what they wanted and found it wanting. "Are you happy?" Hannah blinked. "What?" "Simple question. Are you happy?" "I—yes. I mean, the work is challenging, the money's good, I have a flat in Islington—" "That's not what I asked." Hannah opened her mouth, closed it. Her hand went to her neck, where a thin gold chain disappeared beneath the turtleneck. A nervous habit Rory recognised from their revision sessions in the law library, back when Hannah couldn't articulate a theory without touching her throat. "I don't know," she admitted. "Most days I'm too busy to think about it." "Yeah." Rory finished her pint. "That's what I thought." "What about you? What are you doing now?" Rory almost laughed. Almost. "I deliver Chinese food." Hannah's face did something complicated. "You're joking." "I live in the flat above this bar. I work for a woman named Yu-Fei who makes the best char siu in London. I get paid cash, I set my own hours, and nobody asks me about my career trajectory at parties." "That's... not what I expected." "No. It wouldn't be." "Your father must be—" "My father and I don't speak." Hannah flinched like she'd been struck. In the law library, that would have been unthinkable. Brendan Carter was a legend among the Cardiff law students, a barrister whose name opened doors before he even walked through them. The idea of his daughter cutting ties would have seemed like madness. "Rory..." "Don't pity me. I made my choices. Some of them were stupid, some of them hurt, but they were mine." Rory caught Silas's eye and held up two fingers. He nodded. "I'm not the person you knew. I know that's hard to understand when you've got this whole life built on being that person." "And you don't?" "I barely remember her." Silas arrived with two fresh pints. Hannah stared at hers like it might bite her. "I think about that night sometimes," she said. "The dinner party. I remember thinking his joke was mean, but then he smiled, and everyone laughed, and I thought—" "You thought I was overreacting." "No. I thought I was misreading things. That I didn't have the full context." Hannah's voice cracked. "I convinced myself it was fine because the alternative was admitting I'd let my friend marry someone who treated her like garbage." "We weren't married." "You know what I mean." Rory did. She remembered the engagement ring, the way Evan had slipped it onto her finger in front of his parents like he was marking territory. She remembered the bruises she'd explained away as clumsiness, the comments she'd laughed off because what else was she supposed to do? "I don't blame you," she said, and meant it. "I blame myself. I blame him. But mostly I just... moved on." "Can you teach me how to do that?" The question caught Rory off guard. Hannah looked younger suddenly, stripped of her barrister's armour, just a woman in a bar who'd run into a ghost from her past. "You start by forgiving yourself for not knowing better." "Is that what you did?" Rory picked up her fresh pint. The beer was cold and bitter and perfect. "No. I'm still working on it." Hannah let out a breath that seemed to carry years with it. She picked up her own drink and clinked it against Rory's glass. "To moving on, then." "To moving on." They drank in silence for a while. The bar had filled up around them, Friday night crowds pressing in, voices rising and falling in the familiar rhythm of people pretending their lives weren't falling apart. Silas moved between tables, his slight limp barely noticeable, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching light as he poured drinks. "I should go," Hannah said finally. "Early hearing tomorrow." "Of course." "Can I—would you want to get coffee sometime? Properly catch up?" Rory considered the question. The old her would have said yes immediately, would have scheduled it into her phone and worried about what to wear. The new her understood that some bridges were better left as memories. "Maybe." Hannah nodded, like she understood what that maybe cost. She slid off the stool, pulled a card from her blazer pocket, and set it on the bar. "In case you change your mind." Rory looked at the card. Chambers of Hannah Mercer, Barrister-at-Law. An address in Lincoln's Inn. A phone number. "I'll keep it." Hannah smiled, and for a moment she looked like the girl Rory had stayed up all night with, cramming for contract law exams, eating toast and arguing about consideration and duress. Then she pulled up her collar and walked out into the rain. Rory sat with the card in front of her, the green neon flickering against its cream surface. Silas drifted back down the bar. "Friend of yours?" "Used to be." He studied her face for a moment, then picked up the empty glasses. "Some ghosts are friendlier from a distance." "Yeah." Rory tucked the card into her jacket pocket without looking at it again. "They are."