Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G7F34S2XQQPTSMVV9CQDZ

The green neon bled through the window and laid itself across the bar top in a long, sickly stripe. Aurora sat at the end of it with a glass of red she hadn't touched in ten minutes, watching the wine hold the light. Friday pushed itself against the door in coats and voices. She'd only come down for a single drink, to feel the noise of other people without having to belong to it. Then the door swung and a laugh came in ahead of a woman she had not seen since Cardiff. "God, no. No, it can't be." Aurora looked up. Megan Pryce stood three feet away with her scarf still wrapped and her cheeks coloured from the cold, the same Megan who had once held her hair back over a sink in halls and told her she'd make a terrible barrister because she cared too much about being right. "Meg." "Rory Carter." Megan's hand went to her mouth and dropped again. "Rory bloody Carter. In London. In a bar." "I live here now. Upstairs, actually." "Upstairs where?" "Upstairs here." Megan blinked at the ceiling as if expecting to see through it. She unwound her scarf and dropped onto the stool beside Aurora without being invited, which was the Megan Aurora remembered, the one who treated every chair in the world as if it had been waiting for her. "I'm in town for a conference," Megan said. "Education something. I'm teaching now, did you know? Ysgol Plasmawr. Year Sevens. They eat me alive." "You wanted primary." "I wanted a lot of things." Megan twisted on the stool to look at her properly, and Aurora watched the small arithmetic happening behind her eyes, the subtraction of the girl she'd known from the woman in front of her. "You cut your hair." "Years ago." "It suits you. It's — you look — " "Different." "Thinner." Aurora almost laughed. "That's a polite word for it." "I wasn't being polite." Megan flagged the barman — not Silas tonight, one of the weekend lads — and pointed at Aurora's glass. "Same. And a packet of the salt and vinegar, please, I haven't eaten since Swindon." She turned back. "Your mam said you were in London. She didn't say where. She didn't say much, actually." "She wouldn't." "No." They let that sit. The bar filled in around the silence with other people's evenings, and Aurora felt the weight of three years compressing into the space between their elbows. "You disappeared, Ror." "I left." "You disappeared. Phone went dead. Instagram gone. Katie drove past your flat in April and the curtains were still the same ones from second year and no one was home. We thought — " Megan stopped. Started again. "We didn't know what to think." "I should have rung." "Yeah. You should have." The wine came. Megan took a swallow too fast and set it down. "He hit you, didn't he." Aurora looked at her hands. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the neon and held it, an old moon she'd been carrying since she was nine and had fallen off a wall in her grandmother's garden. She'd told Evan it was from a dog. She didn't know why she had lied about something so small; it had been practice, perhaps, for the bigger lies that came later. "Once," she said. "The once that mattered. Other things before that." "Christ." "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't do the face. I've had the face." Megan's mouth closed. She turned her glass a quarter-turn on the bar, then another. Aurora had forgotten this about her — the way her hands went looking for something to do when her tongue wouldn't behave. "I knew," Megan said. "Not — I didn't know know. But I saw him at that thing at Colin's, the summer before you went quiet, and he had his hand on the back of your neck like you were a cat he was about to put outside, and I thought — I thought, I should say something to her. And then I didn't. Because what would I say? Rory, your boyfriend holds you funny?" "It wouldn't have changed anything." "It might have." "It wouldn't." Aurora finally lifted the wine and drank. "I wasn't ready. You could have stood in front of me with a placard and I'd have walked round you." Megan laughed, a small damp sound, and rubbed under one eye with the heel of her hand. "You're so calm about it. That's the bit that kills me. You used to — Rory, you used to cry at adverts." "I know." "The charity ones with the dogs." "I know." "Where did she go? The one who cried at the dogs." Aurora considered the question. Outside, a taxi horn did its two-note complaint and somewhere behind them a man was telling a joke about his brother-in-law to people who had already heard it. She thought of the girl who had packed a rucksack at three in the morning and sat on the train to Paddington with her passport in her hand as if she were leaving the country and not just the city. She thought of Eva opening the door in Camden in a dressing gown, saying nothing, just moving aside. "She's around," Aurora said. "She comes out sometimes. At weddings. On the phone to my mother. She's just — quieter now." "Is that better?" "It's different." Megan nodded at the bar top. Her thumb worried the rim of her glass. "I brought you a book," she said suddenly. "Last Christmas. I bought you a book and I wrapped it and then I didn't have anywhere to send it so I put it on my shelf. It's still there. It's that Anne Carson one you lent me in first year and never got back." "The Autobiography of Red." "You remember." "I remember everything, Meg. That's the problem." Megan looked at her then, properly, without the arithmetic, and Aurora saw in her face the thing she had been avoiding for three years — not pity, which she could have refused, but grief. The clean, uncomplicated grief of someone who had loved her and been left to wonder, and who was now having to rearrange the wondering into something that could be carried home. "I'm sorry," Aurora said. "For going quiet. I'm sorry." "Yeah." Megan reached over and laid her hand on Aurora's wrist, over the scar, the way she used to in lecture theatres when Aurora's leg wouldn't stop jumping. "Yeah. Me too."