Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTZG9CG4QSK8K5C6EJ050C

The green neon bled through the rain-fogged window of the Raven's Nest, staining the wet pavement the colour of absinthe. Inside, the Wednesday crowd had thinned to the devoted and the desperate: a man at the corner table nursing a whisky he couldn't afford, two women arguing in French about someone called Mathieu, and Silas behind the bar, polishing a glass he'd already polished twice. Rory sat at the end of the counter with a half-finished cider going warm in front of her. She'd come down from the flat upstairs intending to read, but her book lay face-down beside a dish of peanuts, spine cracking open at a page she hadn't turned in twenty minutes. The day had hollowed her out. Three deliveries to Marylebone in the rain, and Yu-Fei had docked her tip money because a customer complained the dumplings were cold. The door opened with its usual complaint of hinges. A gust of October swept in, then a woman shaking out a red umbrella. Rory didn't look up at first. She registered the shape of it: heels expensive enough to click differently on the tile, a coat that hadn't come from any high street. Then she heard the laugh. Just a small one, offered to Silas as the woman apologised for the puddle she'd brought with her. Rory knew that laugh the way you know your own handwriting. "Tess?" The woman turned. For a heartbeat her face did the polite work of any stranger addressed by a stranger—brows lifting, mouth arranging itself toward a question. Then something behind her eyes broke open. "Oh my God. Rory." She crossed the room in three strides and Rory stood without meaning to, and then they were doing that awkward half-embrace that old friends do when the years between them have become a third body in the hug. "Sit down, sit down." Rory gestured at the stool, then changed her mind. "No, a booth. Come on." Silas had already started a gin and tonic without being asked. He slid it across with the smallest lift of his eyebrow—the one that meant *friend of yours? trouble? need me to disappear?* Rory gave him a nod that meant the first and none of the rest. He limped back to his polishing. In the booth under a map of Istanbul that had gone sepia with age, Tess arranged herself. Her hair was different. That was the first thing. In Cardiff it had been a brown bird's nest she tied up with biros when she couldn't find a hairband. Now it was honey-coloured and cut in a blunt line along her jaw, the sort of cut that required an appointment and a postcode Rory couldn't afford. Her nails were bare but shaped. A thin gold chain at her throat held a single pearl. "You look—" Rory started, and stopped, because *different* was the wrong word and *beautiful* wasn't exactly true either. She looked *finished*. Like someone had taken the draft of Tess and turned it in. "Older," Tess offered, and laughed again, and there it was, the old laugh, the Cardiff laugh, the one that used to come out of her when they were seventeen and stealing wine from her father's cellar. "No. God, no. Just—London looks good on you." "London is a suit I put on every morning." Tess took a long drink. "What are you doing here? You said you'd never leave Wales. You said Wales would have to fight you to the death to let you out." "Things change." "Things do." Tess watched her over the rim of the glass. "Evan?" Rory's fingers found the small crescent scar on her wrist, a habit she'd stopped noticing. "Evan." "I heard bits. Cerys rang me. I tried your number but it was dead. I thought—" She set the glass down. "I thought a lot of things, actually. None of them helpful." "I changed it. The number. I changed everything for a while." "And you came here." "Eva lives in Camden. I was sleeping on her floor for three months. Then Silas rented me the flat upstairs for less than it's worth because he's a decent man pretending to be a bastard." She gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "I deliver Chinese food in the rain and I read novels I'm too tired to remember. That's me. What's you?" Tess's mouth worked around something it didn't want to say. "I work at a firm in the City. Restructuring. I married James in 2022, you weren't—" She stopped. "I sent an invitation to your mother's address." "My mother threw it in the bin. She threw a lot of things in the bin that year." Rory tried for lightness and landed somewhere near it. "James. James who?" "Whitcombe." "The one from Bristol? With the teeth?" "He's had them fixed." Rory laughed, and then Tess did, and for a moment the years folded up into a small neat square they could pretend didn't exist. Then Tess said, quietly, "I should have come looking for you." "You had no way to find me." "I had ways. I didn't use them." She traced a line in the condensation on her glass. "When Cerys rang and said he'd—that you were—I told myself you had Eva. I told myself I'd only complicate it. But the truth is I was about to sit the QLTS and I was frightened of everything outside the revision schedule. I made you small so I could keep my head." Rory didn't answer at first. The two women by the window had stopped arguing and started kissing. Silas put a record on, something with a clarinet. "I wouldn't have let you in anyway," Rory said. "Not then. I was feral. I bit Eva once. Actually bit her. On the shoulder, because she tried to take my phone so I wouldn't ring him." "Still." "Still." They sat with it. The word was a stone between them, too heavy to lift, too solid to pretend away. "I kept your copy of *Middlemarch*," Tess said eventually. "The one with your notes in the margins. I couldn't throw it out. It felt like throwing you out." "I wondered where that went." "I'll bring it round. If—" She faltered. "If you'd like." Rory looked at her friend, at the honey hair and the pearl and the hands that had learned to hold themselves still. Underneath it, somewhere, was a girl with biros in her hair. "Bring it round," she said. "Bring yourself, while you're at it." Tess reached across the table. Her fingers stopped short of Rory's, hovered, then settled light as a moth on the crescent scar. "I'm sorry, Rory." "I know. Drink your gin."