AI The green neon above The Raven’s Nest bled through the rain-streaked front windows and turned the glass behind the bar the colour of bruised limes. Rory stood with a tea towel in one hand and a stack of tumblers in the other, turning them under the light until each rim flashed clean. Silas moved at the far end of the bar with his usual spare economy, one shoulder dipped, his silver ring catching when he reached for a bottle. The place smelled of wet wool, old wood, citrus peel, and the ghost of last night’s smoke trapped in the curtains.
A taxi hissed past outside. The front door opened. Cold air rushed in, carrying the sour edge of rain and a sharper note of city exhaust. The bell over the frame gave one short shake.
Rory looked up.
The woman who stepped in had the kind of face you stored away and pulled out years later, half sure memory had sharpened it. For a beat, Rory only saw the shape of her jaw and the colour of her eyes, then the rest came flooding back in one hard shove: a lecture hall in Cardiff with peeling blue seats, cheap coffee in paper cups, shared cigarettes outside the library, laughter that cracked through the cold.
But the woman in the doorway was not that girl.
Her hair had been cut close, the dark curls Rory remembered stripped back to a pale, almost silver crop that showed the line of her skull. A scar ran from the edge of one ear down into her collar, a thin white seam that disappeared beneath the lapel of her coat. She wore black boots with city grime on the soles and carried herself with the careful stillness of someone who had learned how to keep pain from showing in her knees. Her left hand rested on the knob of a cane, though she didn’t lean on it.
She scanned the room, took in the maps on the walls, the black-and-white photographs, the low amber lamps.
Then her gaze hit Rory and stopped.
“Ro?”
The glass in Rory’s hand trembled once against the towel.
No one in London called her that unless they had known her before the flats, before the deliveries, before the flat above the bar and the life she had stitched together from scraps. Rory set the glass down and looked harder, past the scar, past the haircut, into the eyes she remembered laughing over a stolen bottle of wine.
“Bethan?”
A sharp smile pulled at the woman’s mouth, brief and lopsided, as if it hurt to make. She stepped further inside and let the door swing shut behind her.
“Cor, you still looked like a lost sixth former.”
Rory let out a breath that caught between a laugh and a curse. She came round the end of the bar, wiping damp palms on her jeans.
“You looked like a storm in a denim jacket and now you look like you’ve walked out of a solicitor’s office.”
Bethan’s brows lifted.
“You say that like it’s an insult.”
Silas set a bottle down with a soft thud and studied the two of them over the top of his glasses. His hazel eyes moved once from Bethan’s scar to Rory’s face, then back again. He said nothing. The corner of his mouth shifted, not quite a smile, and he turned away to the shelves .
Bethan took a slow look at Rory’s apron, the delivery jacket folded on the stool behind the bar, the crescent-shaped scar at Rory’s wrist where her sleeve had slipped up.
“You’re behind a bar now?”
Rory’s hand went to the stack of clean glasses. “You sound shocked.”
“I sound disappointed.”
“Those are expensive shoes for disappointment.”
Bethan glanced down at them, then back up. “They’re cheaper than the train fare from Cardiff.”
The name dropped between them and sat there, heavy and familiar . Cardiff. Rory had not heard it from Bethan in years. Not like this. Not in a room that smelled of gin and wet coats and a hundred strangers’ secrets.
Rory leaned a hip against the bar. “You moved back?”
“Ended up here. Same as everyone else, apparently.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Bethan slid onto a stool, careful with her leg. “You always did hate vague answers.”
“You always did give them.”
The old ease flashed and vanished. Bethan’s fingers tightened once around the cane handle, then loosened. She took in the room again, the maps with their curling edges, the grainy photos of men in hats and women with hard mouths, then let her eyes settle on Rory.
“You vanished.”
Rory looked at the bottles lined under the bar, at the amber and green and brown glass. “That was sort of the point.”
“You changed your number.”
“I moved.”
“You left Cardiff in the middle of term and didn’t tell anyone where you’d gone.”
Rory’s mouth went dry. She reached for the towel, folded it, unfolded it. “I told Eva.”
Bethan gave a short laugh without much humour. “Eva got one message and about twenty unanswered calls. She called me because she thought you’d ended up in a canal.”
Rory looked away.
Silas came back with a clean tumbler and set it in front of Bethan. He poured a finger of whisky without asking. His ring flashed silver against the dark bottle.
“For the reunion,” he muttered, and moved off again with his limp barely touching the floorboards.
Bethan nodded once at him, then held the glass between both hands without drinking.
“You still knew how to pick strange men.”
“I live above the bar.”
“You’re doing better than I thought, then.”
Rory snorted and crossed her arms. “You came in here with a cane and a scar and that face. You don’t get to talk about expectations.”
Bethan’s thumb traced the rim of the glass. “The cane’s for effect.”
“Liar.”
“Only about the cane.”
Rory stared at her, trying to make the new shape fit the old memory. In university Bethan had filled every room. She had worn her hair long then, dark and wild, and she had always been in motion, tapping knees under desks, stealing chips from everyone’s plate, leaning too far into every argument. Rory remembered her with a chipped black nail polish and a grin that dared people to try and catch her. The woman in front of her carried none of that spill and thunder. She looked carved down to the essentials. The change sat on her shoulders like a second coat.
“What happened to you?” Rory asked.
Bethan lifted one side of her mouth. “You first.”
Rory looked at her wrist, at the crescent scar there, pale as a moon slice. She curled her fingers until the mark disappeared. “I left.”
“That much I gathered.”
“I came to London.”
“Again, the train fares were not subtle.”
Rory’s laugh came out thin. “I got out.”
Bethan watched her over the glass. “Out of Cardiff?”
“Out of…” Rory stopped. The name she did not say seemed to fill the space anyway. Out of Evan. Out of the flat with its splintering door frame and the voice that had taught her to keep her keys in her hand. Out of the life that had turned every corridor into a trap.
Bethan’s eyes flicked to her face and stayed there. “Right.”
Rory hated how much that single word carried. No pity. No prying. Just the understanding that made the room feel smaller.
“You knew,” Rory said.
“I knew enough.”
“You should have told me you were still in touch.”
Bethan set the whisky down. “I wasn’t in touch. Not after you disappeared.”
Rory huffed a breath. “That sounds dramatic.”
“It was dramatic. Eva was dramatic. I was dramatic. You were a bloody exit sign with legs.”
Rory barked a laugh despite herself, then looked down because it hurt more than she expected to hear it. “I was not.”
Bethan tilted her head. “You were. You packed one bag, nicked that awful grey coat from the back of your door, and vanished before dawn. You left your books. You left the plant I kept watering because you swore it would die without attention. You left me with a lecture note in your handwriting and no clue whether you were dead or just rude.”
The words landed hard, each one finding a place she had never put a label on. Rory leaned back against the bar and folded her arms tighter.
“I didn’t know how to leave properly.”
Bethan’s expression shifted, not softening, just opening a fraction. “Did anybody teach you?”
Rory thought of her father with his careful suits and clipped questions, of her mother’s exhausted patience, of Evan’s hand on her elbow when he wanted her to stay put. “No.”
“No,” Bethan repeated, and took a drink at last. She set the glass down with a small click. “You always did hate asking for help.”
“You say that like it was charming.”
“It was annoying.”
Rory smiled before she could stop it. “You used to say my stubbornness was a character trait.”
“It was a defect.”
“You are still rude.”
Bethan’s eyes moved over Rory’s face, her hair, the black shirt with the top button gone. “You’re still defensive.”
“I’m behind a bar in Soho. It comes with the territory.”
“Since when?”
“Since I needed rent.”
Bethan let that sit . The bar hummed around them. Somewhere near the back, ice rattled in a shaker. A pair of men at the far table bent over a game of cards and spoke in low, clipped bursts. Rain pressed against the windows in long grey fingers.
Rory drew in a breath. “You’ve changed.”
Bethan gave her a look. “You already said that.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
Rory shook her head. “No, I mean it properly. You used to fill space like you were daring it to hold you. Now you look like you’ve been cut down to fit somewhere narrow.”
Bethan’s jaw flexed once. The scar at her neck caught the light when she turned. “That’s what time did.”
The bluntness of it made Rory go quiet.
Bethan kept her gaze level. “Time, a divorce, a bad fall, a job that ate every spare hour, and a doctor who liked dramatic vocabulary. Take your pick.”
Rory stared. “Divorce?”
Bethan’s mouth twitched. “You look delighted.”
“I’m not delighted.”
“You are. A bit.”
Rory reached for a bottle, more for something to do than because she wanted it, and filled a glass with water. “I didn’t know you’d married.”
“Because you didn’t ask.”
The answer came out calm enough to sting.
Rory set the glass in front of her and took the empty stool beside Bethan. “When was I meant to ask? After you stopped answering my calls?”
Bethan’s fingers tightened around the whisky glass. “You called twice. Then nothing.”
Rory’s throat worked once. She stared at the water in front of her, at the candlelight caught in the surface. “I was in a bad place.”
Bethan’s voice dropped a shade. “I guessed.”
Rory turned her head. “You did?”
“Rory, you had that look. Like if anyone touched you too quickly you’d crack in half.”
The air changed. Rory held very still.
Bethan saw it and looked down at her hands, then back up. “I’m not asking for names.”
“Good.”
“I’m not asking for details.”
“Better.”
“I’m asking why you never wrote back when I found you on that stupid old address.”
Rory went cold. “You wrote?”
Bethan blinked once. “Several times.”
Rory’s fingers closed over the edge of the stool. “I never got anything.”
Bethan stared at her for a long beat, then looked over at Silas as if he might have stolen the missing letters and filed them in his back room with the secrets. Silas only polished a glass and pretended not to listen.
“I posted them,” Bethan said.
Rory swallowed. The room seemed to tilt a fraction. “I never got them.”
“No.” Bethan’s mouth flattened. “I suppose you didn’t.”
The silence after that was long enough for Rory to hear the rain harden against the glass. She thought of her old flat, the useless half-packed box by the door, the months that followed, the way one day had turned into the next while she kept her head down and her phone face down and every unanswered number became easier to ignore. She had told herself she was staying alive. She had not told herself how many people she was leaving behind.
Bethan turned the whisky glass in a slow circle.
“You look better,” she said.
Rory barked a quiet laugh. “That’s a lie.”
“It isn’t. You look less like you’re running.”
Rory’s mouth tightened. “I’m not.”
Bethan held her gaze. “No?”
Rory thought of the flat above the bar, the narrow bed, the half-open window, the alarm clock she set too early because mornings gave her something to outrun. She thought of the route she took across Soho when she delivered orders, the corners she memorised, the doors she avoided, the names she used only with strangers. “Not tonight.”
Bethan nodded once, as if that answered something she had not spoken aloud.
Silas moved back down the bar, set down a plate with two olives skewered through a silver pick, and gave Rory a look that asked nothing and missed nothing.
Bethan glanced at the plate, then at him. “You always did attract strange men.”
Silas lifted one brow. “And you always did arrive where you weren’t expected.”
Bethan took the olives between two fingers and smiled for the first time properly, though it did not reach the scar at her neck.
“Then I suppose we’ve both kept our talents.”
Rory watched her hand, the new steadiness in it, the way the old girl’s restless tapping had gone still. She wanted to ask a dozen things and could not choose the first one. Bethan noticed, as she always had.
“Go on,” Bethan said. “Ask.”
Rory’s fingers brushed the scar on her wrist beneath the cuff of her shirt.
“What made you come in here tonight?”
Bethan’s eyes met hers and held.
“Your bloody face,” she said, and reached for the whisky again.