Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZV8ZB0NT8PD39DVK73P35F

The green neon bled through the fogged-up window and painted a sickly halo on the bar top. Rory wiped it down with a rag that had seen better decades, humming along to something Silas had put on the speaker — Nina Simone, maybe, or one of the smoky-voiced women he favoured when the Nest was empty enough to hear yourself think. The door chimed. A gust of wet November followed a man inside. He stamped his boots on the mat, shook water from a coat that cost more than Rory's rent, and only then looked up. For a moment she didn't recognise him. Then she did, all at once, the way you recognise your own handwriting from across a room. "Jesus Christ." "Rory?" "Theo." He laughed — a short, stunned sound — and then laughed again, properly, as though giving himself permission. "What in God's name are you doing behind a bar in Soho?" "Pouring drinks, mostly. What are you doing in one?" "Trying to find one that isn't full of people I went to school with." "Well." She spread her arms. "You found her." He crossed the room slowly. The Theo she remembered had been a twig of a boy with ink on his fingers and a habit of chewing the drawstrings of his hoodies. This one wore a charcoal suit beneath the wet coat, and his jaw had acquired definition, and his hair — that ridiculous floppy hair she'd once cut for him in her mum's kitchen — was cropped close at the sides. He looked like an advert for something expensive. Cologne. Insurance. Grief. He sat down on a stool and put his palms flat on the bar as if testing that it was real. "Whisky?" she asked. "Please. Something that won't insult me." "You got snobby." "I got old." "You're twenty-six." "That's what I mean." She poured him two fingers of the Lagavulin Silas kept for customers who tipped. He watched her hands the whole time, and she was conscious, suddenly, of the little crescent scar on her wrist — the one he'd been there for, the afternoon she'd gone through the greenhouse glass chasing a football. He'd run home with her bleeding into his t-shirt. "Cheers," he said, and drank. "Cheers." "So." He set the glass down. "London." "London." "Eva?" "Eva got me out." He nodded, and something ghosted across his face — the ghost of information he already had. Small towns. News travelled even to people who had stopped asking for it. "I heard about Evan," he said. "Did you." "Mam rang me. Said he'd — she said you were all right, though." "I'm all right." "Good." "Now." "Now," he repeated. Silence sat between them for a beat, then another. Somewhere behind the bookshelf at the back of the bar, Rory could hear Silas's slow tread, the small drag of his left foot; he was doing something she wasn't supposed to ask about. Theo didn't know about any of that. Theo didn't know about any of this. "You were going to be a barrister," he said at last. "You were going to be a poet." He snorted. "Touché." "What are you, then?" "Corporate law. Clifford Chance." "Theo." "I know." "Theo Maguire, who wrote that awful poem about the heron." "It wasn't awful." "It rhymed heron with Saigon." "It was metaphorical." "It was shite." He laughed, and for a second it was his old laugh — the one that cracked in the middle — and she could see him, unmistakable, underneath everything he'd put on since. Then he took another sip of the whisky and the grown man came back, composed, faintly apologetic for being composed. "Dad got sick," he said. "Third year of uni. I needed to earn." "I know. I heard." "You never rang." "No." "I waited quite a long time for you to ring." She lowered her eyes to the rag in her hand, pressed her thumb into a stain that wouldn't come up. "I couldn't." "Evan." "Evan." "Right." "I didn't ring anyone, Theo. I didn't ring my mother." "I wasn't your mother." "No. You weren't." He turned the glass a quarter turn, and another. His signet — he had one now too, she noticed, some small crested thing on his little finger — caught the green of the sign outside. "I used to walk past your halls," he said. "When I came up to visit. I'd go the long way so I'd pass your window." "Don't." "I'm not trying to — " "Don't, Theo." "All right." She poured herself a measure of the same whisky without asking him if that was all right, and drank it, and felt it open a warm door in her chest that she immediately wanted to close again. "What are you doing in London?" she asked. "Secondment. Two years. Flat in Bermondsey. All very grown-up." "Wife?" "No." "Girlfriend?" "Was. Isn't." "Sorry." "Don't be. I was a prick." "That I can believe." "I deserved that." "You did." A group of three came through the door and shook off the rain and clattered toward a booth, and she was grateful for the interruption, and when she came back he was still there, which she'd half-expected him not to be. He'd taken off the coat. Underneath, his shirt cuffs were turned back, and the boy she'd known was in the line of his forearm, in the way he was hunched, small, over the glass. "Rory." "Mm." "If I'd rung — if I'd kept ringing — " "You'd have got a man answering my phone." "Would I?" "Yes." "Ah." "It wouldn't have changed anything." "Wouldn't it?" She looked at him properly then, for what felt like the first time since he'd come in. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes. The small, careful way he held himself, as if he'd been taught, recently, how to sit in rooms like this. The way he was still, after everything, waiting for her to absolve him of something she'd never actually asked him to do. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe. No. I don't know." "That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me this year." "Then you need better friends." "I know." He finished the whisky. She didn't pour him another, and he didn't ask.