Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0GE80CWM8TQ4M63FRXRX33

The green neon bled through the rain on the window, staining the bar-top the color of old bottle glass. Rory shook the wet out of her hair and unzipped her delivery jacket, letting the warmth of the Raven's Nest settle into her shoulders. Silas glanced up from the till, lifted a single eyebrow — his way of asking whether she wanted the usual — and she shook her head. Not tonight. Tonight she needed to sit at the end of the bar for a moment before climbing the stairs, needed the buffer of other people's voices before the quiet of her flat. She slid onto the last stool, facing the long wall of black-and-white photographs: men in wool coats on Berlin bridges, a woman laughing outside a café she could never place. Silas set a glass of tonic in front of her without being asked and went back to polishing something that did not need polishing. It was while she was tracing the crescent of her scar — an old habit, a small nervous loop of thumb over wrist — that she heard the voice behind her. "Aurora Carter. My God." She went still the way small animals go still. There were only a handful of people left in the world who used her full name, and fewer still who said it with that particular Cardiff lilt, the soft vowel dragging over the O like someone pulling a blanket off a sleeping child. She turned. He was standing two feet away with a pint already in his hand, which meant he'd been in the bar before she'd arrived and she simply hadn't seen him. That alone was strange. Once upon a time she would have spotted Rhys Morgan the moment she walked into any room in Britain. He had been the sort of boy who arrived before he entered — laugh first, shoulders next, then the rest of him lagging behind, grinning and apologetic. This man was quieter than that. Thinner. The jaw she remembered had sharpened into something almost handsome and almost ill. His hair, that absurd strawberry-blond mop he used to rake back during exams, was cropped close and duller than she remembered, as if someone had washed the color out of it. He wore a grey overcoat that would have been expensive three years ago and a stubble that was older than the day. "Rhys," she said. The name came out carefully. "Sorry. Sorry, I shouldn't have — you were sitting there and I thought, it can't be, and then you did that thing with your wrist." He gave a small, embarrassed gesture at her hand. "You always did that in Contracts. Whenever Pryce called on you." "You remember that." "I remember everything about Contracts. It's the only module I passed." She laughed before she could decide whether to. The sound surprised her. It had been a long time since anyone had made her laugh by accident. "Sit down, then," she said, and pulled out the stool beside her. He lowered himself the way Silas lowered himself on cold mornings — one hand on the bar, testing. She noticed and filed it away and said nothing. "What are you doing in London?" she asked. "Living here. Two years now. Firm moved me up." He considered his pint as if he'd forgotten why he was holding it. "Well. The firm I was at moved me up. I'm — between things at the moment." "Between things." "Gardening leave, technically. A long gardening leave. Possibly a permanent one, if the tribunal goes the wrong way." He smiled, and the smile was the old Rhys, brief and bright and gone. "I don't particularly want to talk about it. What about you? You were going to be a barrister. You were going to be Brendan Carter the second." "I left," she said. "Left law?" "Left Cardiff." He watched her. She could see him doing the arithmetic behind his eyes — the gaps between what he'd heard and what he was seeing now — and she watched the answer arrive on his face without him having to ask for it. "Evan," he said. "Mm." "Rory, I —" "Don't." He stopped. He had always been good at stopping when she asked him to, even in the old days, when he'd been full of opinions and she'd been full of the wish to be allowed her own. It was one of the things she had liked most about him. One of the things, she realized now, she had been hoping he might still possess. "I'm sorry," he said anyway, quietly. "I should have said something. Back then. We all — there were things we all saw, and none of us —" "You were in Edinburgh." "I was on the phone, Rory. I was on the phone every week." She looked down at the tonic. The bubbles had given up. "You were," she said. "You were. I'm not — I'm not angry with you. I don't think I ever was." "Then who are you angry with?" She thought about it. The honest thing was a surprise, when it came. "Nobody. Anymore. That's the worst of it, isn't it. You spend years sharpening something and then one morning you wake up and it's blunt, and you don't even notice until someone asks." He nodded as if she'd described something he'd been trying to name for months. Silas passed behind the bar with his uneven gait, pretending not to listen. Rory knew he was listening. Silas listened to everything; it was what he had been trained to do and what he had never learned not to do. She was grateful, faintly, that he was the one within earshot. He had a way of taking other people's grief and putting it down somewhere safe, like an umbrella you could come back for later. "You look well," Rhys said after a while. "I don't." "You look — settled. That's a better word." "I deliver noodles, Rhys." "You look like someone who knows where she lives." She turned the glass in her hands. "I live upstairs." "Here?" "Here." He looked around the bar — the maps, the photographs, the low gold light — and something in him softened, as if he were seeing a room he'd once imagined and not quite believed in. "That's —" He stopped. "That's good. That's good, Rory." "And you?" she asked. "Where do you live?" He started to answer and then didn't. He drank instead, slowly, and set the pint down with the care of a man who had learned the cost of breaking things. When he spoke again his voice was lower, almost apologetic. "I'm between that, too," he said. Outside, the rain thickened. The neon sputtered once and held. Rory reached across the space between them and put her hand, briefly, over the back of his — the way she used to, in the library, when he was panicking about an exam he would pass easily and she was panicking about a life she could already feel closing around her like a fist. He did not move his hand. Neither of them spoke. Somewhere behind them, Silas turned a glass upside down on a cloth and let them have the silence they had been owed for years.