Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV0EHVF6ZW42S7ENPBM8SC

The green neon bled through the rain-fogged window and caught in the rim of Rory's glass, turning the whisky the colour of pond water. She hadn't wanted whisky. She'd wanted the kind of drink that went down like a lie — something sweet, something that let you pretend. But Silas had set the tumbler in front of her without asking, and she'd stopped arguing with Silas about small things a long time ago. The bell above the door rattled. She didn't look up. People came in from the rain all night this time of year, shaking themselves out like wet dogs, and she'd learned not to lift her head for every arrival. That was one of the lessons of the last eighteen months: the door is never for you, until it is. "Christ on a bike. Aurora Carter." She lifted her head. The woman in the doorway was peeling a sodden scarf from her neck, and for a moment Rory thought she'd mistaken a stranger for someone she used to know. Then the scarf came off, and the face underneath arranged itself into something familiar — the long nose, the gap in the front teeth, the eyes that always looked as if they'd just finished laughing at a joke no one else had heard. "Meg." "Don't 'Meg' me like we saw each other Tuesday." Meg crossed the floor and dropped onto the stool beside her, coat dripping onto the boards. "Four years, Rory. Four bloody years, and here you are sat in a pub in Soho like you never left Cardiff." "I did leave Cardiff." "I can see that." There was a pause in which Meg looked at her, really looked — the kind of look old friends gave you when they were updating the file. Rory kept very still. She knew what Meg was seeing. The hair was shorter now, blunt at the shoulder instead of tumbling down her back the way it had in university. The fringe she used to hide behind was gone. And there was, she supposed, something in her face that hadn't been there before, some settlement of the jaw. "You've gone," Meg said finally, "hard." "Thanks." "I didn't mean it like that." "You did a bit." Meg laughed, and that, at least, was the laugh Rory remembered — a rough bark of a thing, too loud for the room. Silas, wiping a glass at the far end of the bar, glanced up. Rory shook her head at him, a fraction of an inch. He went back to his glass. "What are you drinking?" Meg said. "Whatever this is." "God, whisky. When did you become a whisky person?" "I'm not. The barman is." Meg turned on her stool to look at Silas and then turned back, eyebrows climbing. "Friend of yours?" "Something like that." "You've got a lot of 'something like thats' these days, have you?" Rory smiled at her glass. "One or two." Meg ordered a gin and tonic, loudly, with the sort of cheerfulness people used when they wanted to fill a silence before it formed. When the drink came she took a long swallow and then set it down and said, without looking at Rory, "I rang your mum, you know. After. When you disappeared. Wanted to know you were alive." "I know. She told me." "You never rang back." "No." "Would it have killed you?" "Maybe." Meg's face did a small, complicated thing. She had been Rory's flatmate in second year, the one who'd made tea at three in the morning and hadn't asked questions when Rory came in with her shirt buttoned wrong. The one who'd said, once, carefully, have you thought about what you'd do if he hit you again, Rory, and Rory had said yes, I'd make him a cup of tea and put sugar in it like he likes, and Meg had said that's not what I asked. They hadn't spoken properly after that. Rory had been the one to stop answering. "I wasn't a very good friend to you, at the end," Rory said. "No." "I'm sorry." "Are you?" She thought about it. The bar hummed around them — someone laughing in the booth by the window, the clatter of ice in a shaker, the low thrum of whatever Silas had put on the speakers, something with a piano in it and a woman singing in French. The smell of wet wool and warm wood. "Yes," she said. "Not in the way you'd want. But yes." "What does that mean?" "It means I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm not sorry I left." Meg turned her glass on its coaster, a slow quarter-turn, and then another. "You look like you eat properly now." "I do." "You used to be all — " she gestured vaguely at her own collarbone. "All angles." "I remember." "Do you?" Meg said, and there was something in her voice then, small and sharp, like a pin through cloth. "Because from where I was sitting, Rory, you didn't remember anything. You walked around like a sleepwalker for eighteen months and then one morning you were gone and nobody knew where, and I had to hear from Eva, from Eva of all people, that you were in London, and that was it. That was my answer. Four years of being best friends and my answer was a text from someone else." Rory set the whisky down. She had meant to say something reasonable. What came out was: "I didn't know how to say goodbye to you without you trying to stop me." "I wouldn't have stopped you." "You would have." "Rory — " "You'd have made me tea. You'd have sat me down. You'd have been kind, Meg, you were always kind, and I couldn't — " Her voice caught on something and she cleared it away. "I couldn't afford to be talked out of it. Not that time. There wouldn't have been another time." Meg was quiet a long moment. Then she reached out and, with a gentleness Rory had almost forgotten the shape of, touched the inside of her wrist — the small crescent scar there, pale as a fingernail paring, the one she'd got falling off a wall when she was eight years old and Meg hadn't even known her yet. "I'm glad you went," Meg said. "For the record. I'm glad." "I know." "I'm also furious with you." "I know that too." Meg took her hand back and picked up her gin and drank half of it in one swallow, and when she set the glass down her eyes were wet, but she was smiling in the lopsided way she had always smiled when she didn't want anyone to make a fuss. "So," she said. "Tell me about London. Tell me who you are now." Rory looked down at the whisky, at her own reflection shivering in the surface of it — a woman with short dark hair and a mouth that had forgotten, somewhere along the way, how to tremble. "I don't know yet," she said. "I'm still working it out." "Good," Meg said. "That's good. That's better than who you were." Outside, the rain kept on. The green sign buzzed. Silas, at the end of the bar, poured another measure into a glass neither of them had asked for, and slid it down the wood towards them without a word.