Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GDNJMP725Z66PV9X4CZTH

The green neon buzzed against the Soho drizzle, and Rory shook the wet from her coat before ducking inside. She had meant to go straight upstairs. Her bag was full of leftover dumplings from Yu-Fei, and her feet ached in the particular way that only hours on a scooter could produce. But Silas had left the kettle on the hob downstairs that morning, and she could smell it from the stairwell, so she came in through the bar to turn it off before it scorched. She did not notice him at first. He was folded into a booth near the back, under a photograph of a Berlin street in winter, nursing something amber that he had not touched in a while. It was the stillness that made her look twice. Then the coat, charcoal wool, too expensive for the Nest. Then the face. "Cai." He lifted his head. For a second there was nothing in it, not recognition, not even politeness, just the blank look of a man surfacing from deep water. Then his mouth did something complicated. "Christ. Rory?" "What are you—" She set the bag of dumplings on the bar without looking at it. "What are you doing here?" "Conference. Gray's Inn." He gestured vaguely towards the door, as though the Inns of Court were out in the street. "I was going to walk back to the hotel. It started raining. I saw the sign." "You saw the sign and came into the Raven's Nest." "It looked awful." A small, tired smile. "I thought, that's the sort of place Rory would drag me to." She did not know what to do with her hands. She slid into the booth across from him before the decision to sit had quite finished forming. Up close he was different. The hair she remembered — messy, always flopping over his eye during seminars — had been cut short and was already going at the temples. He had not been thirty the last time she saw him. He was not yet thirty now, and yet. "You look—" he started. "Don't." "I was going to say tired." "Oh." She laughed, and the sound startled her. "Well. That's accurate." Silas was at the far end of the bar, polishing a glass he had already polished, the signet on his right hand catching light each time he turned his wrist. He glanced up once, the way he always did when someone new sat down near her, and she gave him the smallest shake of her head. He looked back down. "Your dad's friend?" Cai asked. "My landlord." "You live above a bar." "I live above a bar." He took a sip of the whisky, at last. "Your mother used to tell mine you were going to be Attorney General one day." "My mother used to tell a lot of people a lot of things." He watched her. It was the same watching she remembered from lecture halls, from the library at two in the morning when they were both deep in Contract and arguing over stupid things to keep awake. Except then it had been looking at; now it was looking for. Cai was trying to find someone in her face. She was trying to do the same to him, and neither of them was succeeding. "You disappeared," he said. "I didn't disappear. I left." "Without telling anyone." "I told Eva." "Eva isn't anyone, Rory. Eva's a conduit to you. The rest of us—" He stopped himself. She watched him stop himself. It was a new skill. The Cai she had known would have said it, whatever it was, and then apologised three times over the next hour. "Sorry. The rest of us wondered, is all." "Did you." "Yes." "Evan told people I'd had a breakdown." "Evan told people a lot of things." She looked at the scar on her wrist, the small pale crescent she had worn since she was nine and fallen off a garden wall. She rubbed her thumb across it. It was an old habit she had almost trained herself out of. "Are you still with him?" he asked, carefully. "No." "Good." "Good," she echoed. The word felt strange in her mouth, as if she had never said it about that before. He turned the glass. The bar's light moved through the whisky and printed small amber shapes on the scarred wood. "I made partner last month." "Cai. That's— that's fast." "It's obscene," he said. "It's so fast it's funny. I don't sleep. I don't read anything that isn't a brief. I used to read, Rory." He looked up at her with something helpless in his face. "Do you remember I used to read?" "You made me read Austerlitz. I never forgave you." "That's the last novel I finished." "When?" "2019." She did not know what to say to that. Outside, a bus hissed through the wet. Somebody down the bar laughed too loudly at something on a phone, and Silas gave the laugh a slow, disapproving look, and the laugh tapered off. "You look well," Cai said, and this time he meant it. "Different, but well. Better than—" "Than I was." "Than you were." "I'm a delivery driver." "I know. You've got a coat with a dragon on it and your hair's full of rain." "I'm a delivery driver and I'm better than I was." She said it to the table, testing whether it was true, and found that it was, more or less. "I don't know what to do with that information yet." "You don't have to do anything with it." "People always think you do." He reached across the table then, not quite to her hand, just to the space near it, and rested his fingers on the wood. An old gesture. He had done it in the library in Cardiff the night she told him about the first bruise, and she had not taken his hand then either, and they had sat like that until closing. "I should have come to find you," he said. "You didn't know where I was." "I should have known. I should have asked better questions." "Cai—" "I'm saying it. Let me say it." She let him say it. She watched his hand on the wood, the tendons new and tight where they had once been slack and ink-stained, and thought about how the years do not take people away from you all at once. They do it a sip at a time, until you look up in a strange bar in a city you ran to and find someone you used to know sitting across from you wearing a coat you do not recognise, drinking something you would not have chosen, apologising for a silence that you made together. "All right," she said. "All right. It's said."