Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1G3SY2HCMRGS1R2BZEKFH3

The green neon hummed against the rain-streaked window, throwing a sickly underwater glow across the bottles. Rory had come to like that hour, the slack stretch after the lunch crowd thinned and before the after-work suits arrived, when the Nest belonged mostly to the maps on the walls and the long-dead faces in their black frames. Silas was in the back, doing whatever it was Silas did in the back. She had agreed to mind the bar in exchange for a month's reduced rent, and the bargain suited her. There was a kind of peace in pouring drinks for strangers who wanted nothing from her but the drink. The door let in a gust of cold and a woman in a camel coat, shaking water from a folded umbrella. Rory knew her before she knew her. That was the strange thing—the body recognized her first, some old animal part that tightened in the chest. Then the name arrived, slow and disbelieving. "Megan?" The woman looked up. For a half-second her face did nothing at all, the polite blankness of someone bracing to be mistaken for somebody else. Then it cracked open. "God. Rory. *Rory.*" She crossed the room with both hands out, and Rory came around the bar and let herself be held, and it was awkward in the way these things always were, two people clutching at a friendship that had been left out in the weather for years. "You look—" Megan pulled back and held her at arm's length, scanning. "Your hair's short." "It's been short for a while." "It was down to here." Megan touched her own collarbone. She had cut hers too, Rory saw, into something sharp and expensive that ended at the jaw. Everything about her was sharper. The girl Rory remembered had been all soft edges, jumpers two sizes too big, biting her cuticles in the back row of contract law. This woman wore a coat that cost more than a month above the bar, and her nails were lacquered the colour of dried blood, and there was a watch on her wrist that did not need to tell anyone the time. "What are you doing here?" Rory asked. "In London. In—this exact spot on the earth." "Conference. Tedious. I slipped out early and just—walked." Megan laughed, glancing around at the maps, the dim amber light. "Followed the ugliest sign I could find. I had no idea you—do you *work* here?" "I live upstairs. I help out." "Upstairs." Megan said it like a word in a foreign language. She set her umbrella against the bar and slid onto a stool, and Rory went back around to her own side, and there was something right about the bar being between them, a polished barrier they could both put their hands on. "What can I get you?" "What do people drink in a place like this?" "Whatever you want." "Whisky, then. Whatever's good." Rory poured two, because it would have been strange not to. She slid one across, and Megan caught it and turned it in the light, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and the neon buzzed, and somewhere behind the bookshelf at the back there was the muffled sound of Silas moving a chair. "You disappeared," Megan said finally. Not unkindly. "You know that? One day you were in halls and the next your room was cleared out and your mam was ringing round asking if anyone had seen you." "I rang my mam." "After. Weeks after." Megan drank. "We thought something had happened to you." "Something had happened to me." The words came out flatter than Rory intended, and she watched them land. Megan's jaw worked. She did know—or she knew the shape of it, the parts that had reached her secondhand. Everyone in that small bright circle of their lives had known about Evan eventually, in the way that people know a thing and do nothing with it, file it under *not my business* and pass the salt. "I should have rung you," Megan said. "Before. When you stopped coming to things. I knew you'd stopped coming." "You were busy." "I was a coward." Rory let that sit. Outside a bus heaved past, throwing its light up the wet glass and away. She had imagined this conversation, in the early days, lying awake in the unfamiliar London dark with her heart going like a trapped bird. She had imagined Megan, Eva, all of them, arriving with arms full of apology. The fantasy had been important then. It had got her through some nights. It surprised her now how little it weighed. "You finished, then," Rory said. "Law." "I did." Megan straightened, and the brittleness rearranged itself into something more familiar to her, the armour she wore now. "Pupillage, the lot. I'm at a set in Cardiff. Commercial mostly. It's—" She turned the glass again. "It's good. It's what we said we'd do. What you said you wouldn't." "I never wanted it." "No." Megan looked at her, and something old surfaced in her face, the girl under the haircut. "You used to say you'd rather drive a van than wear a wig. We thought you were joking." Rory thought of the Golden Empress, of Yu-Fei pressing warm cartons into her hands, of the city unspooling under her wheels at night, anonymous and hers. "I drive a van," she said. "Three days a week. Deliveries." She waited for the flinch, the pity. Megan only nodded slowly, and her eyes went bright and wet at the edges, and she looked down at the bar. "You sound happy," she said. "That's the thing. You sound—" She shook her head. "I've spent ten years becoming exactly what I was supposed to become. And I walked into this awful little bar and there you are, in a place that smells like spilled beer, pouring whisky, and you sound happier than anyone I know." "I'm not happy," Rory said. "Not the way you mean. I'm just not afraid all the time anymore." The honesty of it seemed to take the air out of both of them. Megan reached across the bar then and laid her hand over Rory's, the lacquered nails, the cool weight of all that jewellery, the small living warmth of the palm underneath. The crescent scar on Rory's wrist caught the green light. Megan had been there when she got it, both of them nine years old and stupid on a garden wall in Roath. She knew Megan was remembering it too. "I'm sorry," Megan said. "That I let you vanish and called it your choice." Rory turned her hand over and held it, briefly, and let go. "We were children," she said. "And then we weren't, and nobody tells you when it happens." The bookshelf at the back gave its low groan, and Silas emerged, signet ring catching the light, taking in the scene with one unhurried sweep before nodding and limping toward the cellar door. Megan watched him go and didn't ask. She finished her whisky and set the glass down with the care of someone laying something to rest. "I should get back," she said. "The conference." "Yeah." She stood, gathered her coat, her umbrella. At the door she stopped. The rain had thickened, blurring the street to ribbons of light. "Will you ring me this time?" Rory asked. "Or shall I let you vanish?" Megan smiled, and it was the old smile, the one from the back row, before any of it. "Ring me," she said. "I'll answer. I promise I'll answer." Then the door, and the cold, and the green sign laying its long stain across the empty stool where she'd been.