Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYX9DB23W13QY5J4ZB0ZW4X

The green neon hummed over the door of the Raven's Nest, throwing watery light across the wet pavement. Inside, the rain became a rumour, distant and irrelevant, swallowed by the murmur of low voices and the clink of glass. Aurora shouldered through the door with a damp paper bag pressed to her chest, the smell of fried garlic and ginger trailing behind her. She'd done this delivery a hundred times. Silas always ordered the same thing on Thursdays, and she always pretended she didn't know it was an excuse to make sure she'd eaten. She set the bag on the bar and shook the rain from her sleeves. "You're soaked through, Rory." "It's London. That's the standard condition." Silas reached beneath the counter, produced a clean towel, slid it across the polished wood. The signet ring on his right hand caught the light. "Eat something before you go back out. Yu-Fei can spare you ten minutes." She was halfway through draping the towel round her neck when a voice cut in from the far end of the bar. Low, amused, frayed at the edges. "Aurora Carter. As I live and breathe." She went still. Her hand stopped at her throat. The man sitting in the corner booth had a glass of whisky in front of him, untouched by the look of it, the ice gone to water. He was thinner than she remembered, the kind of thin that came off rather than ran in the family, and his jaw carried three days of stubble going silver at the chin. But the eyes were the same. Tom's eyes. Pale grey, always slightly mocking, even when he didn't mean them to be. "Tom Hadley." Her own voice came out flatter than she intended. "What are you doing in London?" "What's anyone doing in London? Hiding, mostly." He gestured at the seat across from him with two fingers, the universal grammar of an invitation he didn't expect refused. "Sit. Christ. It's been—what, six years?" "Seven." She didn't sit. Not yet. She glanced at Silas, who had busied himself with a rack of glasses, the way he did when he wanted you to know he wasn't listening, which meant he was listening to every word. "Seven." Tom laughed, and it caught somewhere in his chest and turned into a cough. "You always did keep the better count." She crossed the floor and lowered herself into the booth. The leather sighed beneath her. Up close he was worse—the grey under his skin, the tremor in the hand that lifted the watered-down whisky to his mouth. "You look well," he offered. "You don't." "There she is." He smiled, and for a second the years peeled back and he was twenty-two again, standing on the steps of the Cardiff law library with a stolen sandwich and a borrowed cigarette, telling her she was the only honest person he'd ever met. "Still don't waste a word." "How would you know what I waste anymore?" That landed. She watched it land. He set the glass down with exaggerated care, as if it might shatter from a careless touch. "Fair," he said. "That's fair." She studied him. The Tom she'd known had been all motion—hands carving the air when he spoke, leg jittering under the lecture-hall desk, three plans running at once and none of them finished. This man was a held breath. Still in a way that wasn't peace. "You were going to be a human rights barrister," she said. "The Hague. Remember that? You had it mapped out on a napkin." "I had a lot of napkins." He turned the glass a slow quarter-turn on the table. "Turns out the Hague doesn't take much interest in men who can't get out of bed before noon." "Tom." "Don't." He held up a hand. "Please. Don't do the voice. I've had the voice from everyone with a pulse and most of them were paid to do it." She let the silence sit. Behind the bar, Silas turned on a tap, and the rush of water filled the space where words should have gone. "I heard you'd left," Tom said finally. "After—after Cardiff. After all that. Eva said you'd gone to ground in London. Wouldn't tell me where." "Eva's good at keeping things." "She is." He looked at her then, properly, the mockery draining out of his face and leaving something rawer beneath. "I should've called. When it happened. With Evan. I should've—I knew something was wrong, Rory. I knew the way he talked about you. The way he'd watch the room. I told myself it wasn't my business." Her jaw tightened. The crescent scar on her wrist felt suddenly cold, the way it did when the weather turned, the way it did when she thought about doors that didn't lock from the inside. "It wasn't your business." "It was my friend." He said it quietly. "You were my friend. And I had my own mess by then. Easier to look at yours and decide you had it handled. You always seemed like you had it handled." "That's the trick of it." She turned her own glass—Silas had set water in front of her without asking. "Everyone decides you're fine because they need you to be." He nodded slowly. Outside, a bus hissed past, its lights smearing across the rain-streaked window. "What happened to you, Tom?" she asked. Not unkind. Just true. He laughed again, softer. "The long version or the short?" "I've got ten minutes. Silas says." "Then the short." He spread his hands. "I got everything I wanted, more or less. Pupillage. Chambers. The flat in Clerkenwell. And somewhere around the third year of doing exactly what I'd planned, I woke up and couldn't remember why any of it had ever mattered. So I started drinking the question quiet. Worked for a while." He tapped the glass. "Doesn't anymore. This is club soda, by the way. Ninety-one days. Your barman knows. He keeps the colour right so I don't have to explain myself to a room." She looked at Silas. He didn't look back, but the corner of his mouth moved. "Ninety-one days," she repeated. "And one very long Thursday." Tom met her eyes. "I didn't know you'd be here. I want that on the record. I'm not—I didn't come to ambush you with the past." "I know." And she found, to her own surprise, that she did. "You came here for the same reason I keep ending up here. It's somewhere you can sit and not have to be the version of yourself everyone remembers." Something in his face cracked, just slightly, just enough. "God," he said. "You really didn't waste a word."