AI The green neon above the doorway bled into the wet pavement outside The Raven’s Nest, turning the puddles jade and black. Rory pushed through the door with cold air clinging to her coat and the smell of rain in her hair. The bar held its usual low hum: cutlery scraping, a burst of laughter near the back, the soft clink of glass, the old photographs on the walls catching the amber light like eyes that never blinked.
Silas stood behind the bar with a cloth over one hand, wiping a tumbler until it shone. His silver signet ring flashed when he lifted the glass.
“Late for a delivery,” he muttered, watching her hang her damp satchel on the chair by the wall.
“Late for a drink,” Rory replied, and slid onto a stool.
His hazel eyes flicked to the paper bag in her hand. “Golden Empress?”
“Last run of the night.”
“She’s feeding Soho while you starve in it.”
Rory gave a short laugh and rubbed at the back of her neck. The crescent scar on her wrist showed when her sleeve rode up, pale against her skin. “That sounds about right.”
Silas set a glass of water in front of her before she asked, then angled his head toward the far end of the bar. “Your table’s occupied.”
Rory looked over without much interest at first, then her spine went rigid.
A woman sat alone beneath the framed photograph of a canal in Venice, one of the older images in the room, her coat folded over the chair beside her. She held a wineglass with both hands, long fingers wrapped around the stem as if warming them . Her hair, once a dark curly halo that had always escaped every tie and clip, had been chopped into a sharp silver-blonde bob that skimmed her jaw. A suit jacket sat over her shoulders with the ease of something expensive and precise. Her face had narrowed into angles Rory recognised only after her stomach had already dropped.
Mara.
Not the girl who had stolen chips from cardboard trays outside Cardiff University library. Not the one who had sprawled on Rory’s bed in a shared student flat, painting her nails while they argued about law, music, and whether they’d ever get out of Wales. The woman at the end of the bar looked like she had stepped out of a glass office on the thirty-second floor and into this basement of maps and old smoke by mistake.
Rory stared long enough for Mara to look up.
The glass stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Oh,” Mara breathed, and the word seemed to catch on her teeth .
Rory slid off the stool. “You’re in London.”
Mara’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost a grimace. “So are you.”
Silas’s cloth paused against the bar top. He looked from one to the other, but said nothing.
Rory took two steps before stopping as if she had hit an invisible pane of glass. “You cut your hair.”
Mara lifted a hand to it, fingers brushing the blunt edge by her cheek. “That’s what you lead with?”
“It’s all I can process right now.”
Mara barked a laugh, and for one second the girl from Cardiff flashed through her face, the one who used to laugh so hard she snorted into her tea and then glare at anyone who noticed. Rory’s chest tightened.
“You look the same,” Mara said.
Rory snorted. “Liar.”
Mara’s eyes dropped to Rory’s black hair, the delivery jacket, the damp hem of her jeans. “No. Not a liar. You look like you’ve been living.”
Silas turned away to fetch another glass from the shelf, giving them room without turning his back completely .
Rory crossed her arms. “That sounded rehearsed.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You sound different.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
Rory’s laugh came out sharp. “Fair.”
Mara looked past her shoulder at the wall of photographs. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“I work here sometimes.” Rory nodded toward the bar. “Above here, actually.”
Mara blinked. “You live above Silas Blackwood’s bar?”
Silas let out a quiet huff. “As if I’d let her live anywhere else.”
Rory glanced at him. “You’re enjoying this.”
“Immensely.”
Mara’s eyes stayed on Rory. “You always did collect strange fathers.”
Rory froze for the briefest beat, then the corner of her mouth lifted despite herself. “You remember him.”
“I remember meeting him at that awful fundraiser in Llandaff when he spent twenty minutes asking me if I had plans to work in ‘proper law’ or ‘one of those fashionable branches that doesn’t hold up in court.’” Mara’s voice had gone softer around the edges. “Your mother looked like she wanted to bury him under the buffet table.”
“She probably did.”
“She should have.”
The laugh that slipped out of Rory then had no polish on it. It cracked out of her before she could stop it, and the sound seemed to loosen something in the room. Mara looked at her for a long second, and Rory saw the change again, not just in the haircut and the suit, but in the stillness . The old Mara had always moved like she was in a hurry to the next thing, hands going, head turning, words tripping over each other. This Mara sat with her shoulders back and her chin level, as if she had spent years learning how to occupy space without giving any of it away.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Rory asked.
Mara tipped her glass. “Already started.”
“Then I’ll buy the next one.”
“I wasn’t about to refuse.”
Rory took the seat opposite her. The stool legs scraped against the floor, loud in the small gap between them. Up close, she could see a faint line at Mara’s hairline and the faint shadow under her eyes, neatly hidden by makeup that had no business looking that perfect under bar light.
Silas set a fresh glass in front of Rory without a word. She gave him a look , and he lifted a brow as if to say, Don’t waste the evening.
Rory turned back. “How long have you been in London?”
“Six years.”
The number landed between them with surprising weight .
“Six,” Rory repeated.
Mara nodded once, as though the word had cost her something.
“You never told me.”
“You disappeared.”
Rory leaned back. “You changed your number.”
Mara’s jaw flexed. “After my father died, I sold the flat. I left. There wasn’t much point in keeping old lines open.”
Rory looked down at her glass. “I heard your dad was sick.”
“From who?”
“Clare. She still posts the odd thing. Birthdays, weddings, funerals if she can find a photo. She’s still in Cardiff.”
Mara’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Of course she is.”
Rory caught the edge in her voice. “You don’t like Clare now?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to.”
Mara’s fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. “And you? You still talk to everyone? Keep tabs on all the ghosts?”
Rory held her gaze. “Not as many as I used to.”
That landed too. Mara looked away first, at the maps on the wall, at a black-and-white photograph of men in hats standing beside a riverbank. The silence between them stretched just long enough to let old pictures rise in Rory’s head: rain on the Cardiff pavements, kebab grease on paper, Mara laughing in a lecture hall doorway while Rory balanced too many books against her chest, both of them certain the future was a thing they could grab by the collar and drag wherever they pleased.
Mara broke the silence with a small, bitter exhale. “You left Wales and never looked back.”
Rory’s fingers curled around the cold glass. “That wasn’t how it went.”
“It felt like it.”
Rory looked up fast. “You weren’t the one living with Evan.”
The name cut through the table like broken glass. Mara’s face changed at once, the polished calm slipping just enough for concern to show underneath.
“He still did that to you?”
Rory stared at the bar mat under her glass. The fabric had soaked up years of spilled drink and doubt. “No.”
Mara didn’t push. She only nodded once, slow and careful. “Good.”
Silas set a bottle on the bar beside him and pretended not to listen, though Rory knew better. He heard everything. It was part of the trade.
Mara took a sip and watched Rory over the rim. “You got out.”
Rory gave a shrug that managed to be both lazy and sharp. “Eventually.”
“You say that like it was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. It was just… done.”
Mara’s eyes narrowed , not in anger, but in the way they used to when she was working through a problem on paper. “You always made hard things look easy.”
Rory gave a short laugh . “That was your line, not mine.”
“No, it was yours. You just hated hearing it.”
The memory hit with enough force to make Rory look away. A kitchen in Cardiff. Cheap takeaway boxes. Mara with a pencil tucked behind her ear, pacing Rory’s room while Rory argued over an essay about negligence law and whether anyone ever really escaped the shape of their upbringing.
“You used to say I could talk my way out of anything,” Rory said.
“I was wrong.”
“Now who’s flattering.”
Mara’s lips twitched. “You did get out of things. Just not the things you should have.”
Rory’s thumb found the scar on her wrist without her meaning to. She pressed it once, hard. “And you did?”
Mara sat back. “I got into things.”
Rory raised an eyebrow . “That sounds suspicious.”
“That’s because it is.”
Silas made a low sound from behind the bar. “If this turns into a confession, do keep it interesting.”
Mara glanced at him, and for the first time a real smile touched her face. “You still keep company like a vicar with a knife in his pocket.”
“Only on weekdays.”
Rory watched the exchange, the old chemistry between them, and some strange grief moved through her. Silas had always known how to make a room open its mouth and reveal its teeth. Mara seemed to recognise it too; she leaned back slightly , as if measuring the distance between danger and comfort and deciding this one was safe enough for now .
“You work for him?” she asked Rory .
“Not exactly.”
“Translation?”
“I deliver food. I live upstairs. He tells me things I don’t ask for and calls it mentoring.”
Silas touched two fingers to the brim of an invisible hat. “She makes it sound unflattering.”
Mara studied Rory a moment longer. “You look tired.”
Rory gave a dry smile. “You look expensive.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you get.”
Mara exhaled and set her glass down. “Fair.”
The music changed overhead, a low brass line sliding in under the noise of the room. Someone near the jukebox laughed too loudly. Glass clinked. Rain tapped at the front windows in a fine, restless pattern.
Rory took a drink, then said, “You said six years.”
“Yes.”
“And you never once came back?”
Mara’s gaze held steady. “Did you?”
Rory opened her mouth, then shut it again.
Mara watched her face change, and something in her expression softened just enough to hurt. “I thought so.”
Rory gave a small shake of her head. “I meant to.”
“You always meant to. That was your talent.”
“That’s cruel.”
“It was meant to be.”
They sat with that. Not angry. Not exactly. Just two people shaped by the gap between intention and action, one of them polished by it, the other scraped raw.
Mara looked down at her own hands. “I kept meaning to call.”
Rory let out a breath through her nose. “I kept meaning to answer.”
Mara glanced up then, quick and direct. “You didn’t know I called.”
Rory went still.
Mara lifted one shoulder. “Twice.”
The room seemed to tip. Rory felt heat crawl up her neck. “You called me?”
“I left messages.”
“At what number?”
“The one you gave me.”
Rory stared at her.
“I didn’t get them,” she said, and heard how thin it sounded.
Mara’s mouth tightened. “No. I suppose not.”
Silas cleared his throat softly and turned the bottle in his hand, giving them a reason not to look at him if they needed it.
Rory rubbed at her forehead. “Evan changed my phone. He—” She stopped, jaw locked . “That doesn’t matter.”
Mara didn’t answer straight away. Her eyes stayed on Rory’s face, and when she spoke again her voice had gone low, stripped of the bite she’d used before. “It mattered then.”
Rory laughed once, no humour in it. “Everything mattered then. That was the problem.”
Mara’s expression shifted. She looked as if she wanted to reach across the table, then didn’t. “I’m sorry.”
Rory swallowed. The apology sat there between them, plain and useless and real. She had spent years wanting to hear something like it, and now it only left her with more to carry.
“For what?” Rory asked.
Mara gave a short, tired shake of her head. “For not finding you sooner.”
Rory looked at her properly then, at the lines she hadn’t noticed from a distance, at the steadiness someone had carved into her. “You did find me. Eventually.”
Mara’s lips parted, but before she could answer, the front door opened and a gust of cold air swept in across the bar. The rain had thickened. Someone shook water from a coat. Silas turned toward the new arrival, already half away, the silver ring on his right hand catching the light as he reached for a glass.
Mara followed Rory’s glance to the door, then back again. The old world and the new one sat on the table between them, no neat border, no easy handoff. Rory could feel the weight of years in the space where their lives had stopped touching.
Mara lifted her glass. “One more?”
Rory reached for hers, keeping her eyes on the woman who had once known every reckless thing she thought she could become. “Yeah,” she said, and the word came out steadier than she expected . “One more.”