Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTXYWE9781A4TJTCZWY28D

The green neon bled across the wet pavement in long, uncertain fingers, the kind of light that made strangers of everyone it touched. Rory stamped her boots outside The Raven's Nest, shook the rain from her jacket, and pushed through the door with the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent eleven hours carrying other people's dinners up other people's stairs. She wanted a whisky. She wanted to sit at the corner of the bar where Silas kept a stool clear for her, tucked between the old RAF photograph and the map of Berlin in 1961, and not be asked anything she couldn't answer. The bar was quiet for a Tuesday. An older couple murmured over a single glass of red. A man in a damp overcoat read a paperback with its spine broken. And at the far end, perched on her stool as if the stool had been waiting for her, sat a woman who did not immediately belong to any of Rory's lives, and then belonged to one of them so completely that Rory stopped walking. "No," the woman said, turning. "Carter. No." "Bee." Beatrice Ng—Bee to everyone who'd ever loved her, and a few who had only tried—slid off the stool and crossed the floor in three strides. She had been small at university, all elbows and jumper sleeves pulled over her hands, and she was small still, but compacted now, hardened, as if the years had pressed her into something denser. Her hair was cropped close to the skull. A faint, silvery line ran from the corner of her mouth to the edge of her jaw. She wore a suit that fit the way expensive suits fit, and when she embraced Rory, Rory felt the shape of a shoulder holster beneath the wool, or imagined she did, which in Silas's bar amounted to the same thing. "Christ," Bee said into her hair. "Christ, Rory." "You're in London." "You're alive." They pulled back and looked at each other. Rory felt the years assemble themselves, a quick brutal arithmetic. Seven. Almost eight. The last time had been the kitchen of the Cathays house, Bee pouring coffee with hands that were already shaking for reasons Rory had not yet learned to name, and Evan's voice on the landing above them, asking what was taking so long. "Let me buy you a drink," Bee said. "I live here." "What?" "Upstairs. I live upstairs." Bee's face did something complicated. "Of course you do. Of course you bloody do. Come on." They took the stool and the one beside it. Silas, who missed nothing, poured Rory her whisky without being asked and raised one auburn-streaked eyebrow the precise fraction of an inch that meant: *you're all right?* Rory nodded. He set the glass down, tapped the bar with his signet ring—a small, deliberate percussion that Rory had come to read as *I'm here*—and drifted to the other end to polish glasses that didn't need polishing. "He looks like a man who could hide a body," Bee said. "He looks like a man who has." Bee laughed, and for a moment she was nineteen again, sitting on the floor of Rory's halls room with a bottle of cheap Merlot and a packet of custard creams, laughing at something so small neither of them could remember it afterwards. Then the laugh subsided, and she was not nineteen, and the silver scar at her jaw caught the green neon from the window and turned briefly, horribly, beautiful. "You cut your hair," Rory said, because it was the safest thing. "You kept yours." "I kept most of it." "You left Cardiff." "I left Cardiff." "I went to look for you," Bee said. She said it carefully, the way one might set down a glass that had a crack in it. "After. I went to the house and he told me you'd gone to your mother's, and I went to your mother's and she told me you'd gone to a cousin in Galway, and by the time I'd worked out that there was no cousin in Galway you were—" She lifted a hand and let it fall. "Gone." "Eva came and got me." "Eva." Bee nodded slowly. "Eva was smarter than me. Eva was always smarter than me." "She wasn't smarter. She just—" Rory turned the whisky in her fingers. The small crescent scar on her inner wrist caught the light, a pale comma that had been there so long she had stopped noticing it, except on nights like this, when old things surfaced. "She just didn't ask. She just showed up. I don't think I could have answered questions then. Not even yours." "I would have come," Bee said. "If you'd asked." "I know." "I would have killed him, Rory." Rory looked up. Bee's face was perfectly still, and Rory understood, with the slow cold clarity of a lock sliding home, that it was not a figure of speech. That whatever Bee did now, in whatever suit, in whatever city she flew in from, had taught her to say that kind of sentence the way other people said *I would have picked you up from the airport*. "That's what I was afraid of," Rory said quietly. Bee took a drink. She did not deny it. The couple in the corner laughed at something, and the sound came to them from very far away. "What are you doing here, Bee?" "Passing through. Meetings tomorrow. I wanted—" She stopped. "I wanted a drink somewhere no one would find me, and I walked past the green sign, and I thought, that looks like somewhere no one would find me. And then you walked in." "Bad luck." "Good luck. I think." She turned on the stool and studied Rory with an attention that was almost professional, and Rory felt, uncomfortably, that she was being catalogued. "You look well. You look—settled. Are you settled?" "I'm delivering noodles for a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown." "You were going to be a barrister." "My father was going to be a barrister. I was going to be whatever got me out of the kitchen." "And this got you out of the kitchen?" "This got me out of the kitchen." Bee smiled, and it was a smaller, sadder version of the smile Rory remembered, as if someone had taken the old smile and folded it in half to fit inside the new face. "I'm glad," she said. "I'm glad you got out, Rory. I'm glad it wasn't me who had to come and get you." "Are you?" The question surprised them both. Bee looked down at her glass. The silver scar moved along her jaw as she worked it. "No," she said, at last. "No, I think I'll regret that until I die. I think I already have." Rory reached across the small dim space between them and put her hand over Bee's, and Bee's hand was warm and callused in ways it had never been in Cardiff, and they sat like that while Silas polished a glass that did not need polishing and the green neon bled on, indifferent, through the rain.