Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8Q30HE6GWK0JW343ZWPZC

The Raven's Nest smelled the way it always did—old whisky soaked into wood, the faint char of the fireplace Silas never let burn out even in July. Rory wiped down the bar top with a rag that had seen better decades, half-listening to the murmur of Tuesday-night regulars, when the door opened and let in a slice of grey London evening. The man who walked in wore a suit that cost more than her monthly rent. He stood in the doorway for a second too long, scanning the room like he'd wandered into the wrong postcode. "Christ," he said, "this place is exactly the same." Rory's rag stopped moving. "Marcus?" He turned, and there it was—the same lopsided grin from sixth form, except now it sat on a face that had learned to be careful with itself. Fewer lines than she expected. More grey at the temples than she remembered. "Rory Carter. Didn't think you'd actually still be pulling pints." "Didn't think you'd still be alive, the way you drove that Fiesta." He laughed, and for a second the years peeled back—seventeen, both of them, sneaking cans of cider onto the roof of the leisure centre. Then he sat down at the bar like he'd never left, like eight years hadn't happened in between, and the illusion cracked at the edges. "What'll it be?" she asked, sliding a coaster toward him out of habit rather than necessity. "Whatever's good. Surprise me." "You used to only drink lager. The cheap stuff, in the blue cans." "People change, Rory." She reached for the good gin, the one Silas kept for people who tipped well or looked like they needed something stronger than beer. She poured it slow, watching him from the corner of her eye—watching how he sat, spine straight, hands folded like he was in a meeting rather than a bar in Soho. "So," she said, setting the glass down. "What happened to you?" "Investment banking happened to me. Canary Wharf, mostly. A few years in Singapore." "Singapore." "You'd hate it. Too clean." "I don't hate clean." "You used to. You used to say clean was for people who'd given up on being interesting." She hadn't remembered saying that, but it sounded like something she would've said, back when she thought Cardiff was a cage and London was a door. Before Evan. Before the flight north with nothing but a duffel bag and Eva's phone number scrawled on a napkin. "You look different," he said. "Older." "Sharper. Like someone sanded off the soft bits." "Someone did." He waited for more, the way old friends do, thinking the years owe them an explanation. She didn't give him one. Instead she picked up another glass and started drying it, though it was already dry. "I heard about the law thing," he said, careful now, like he was stepping onto ice he wasn't sure would hold. "That you didn't finish." "News travels." "Your mum told my mum. You know how it goes." "I know how it goes." "What happened?" She set the glass down harder than she meant to. Somewhere behind her, in the shadow near the bookshelf that wasn't really a bookshelf, she felt the space where Silas usually stood, listening without listening, the way he did with everyone. Tonight he was in the back room, some appointment she wasn't privy to, and the absence of him left her exposed in a way she didn't like. "I found something better to do with my time," she said. "Delivering Chinese food." "You've done your research." "Small world. Your mum again." "She talks too much." "She's proud of you. Even if she doesn't understand the—" he gestured vaguely at her, at the bar, at the rag in her hand, "—current arrangement." "Nobody understands the current arrangement. That's rather the point." He turned the gin glass in slow circles, not drinking, just turning it, the ice clicking against crystal. She recognised the gesture—he used to do that with a can of cider on the leisure centre roof, turning it and turning it while he worked up the nerve to say something true. "I thought about looking you up," he said. "After you left Cardiff. I had your number for a while. Never called." "I changed it anyway. After Evan." His jaw tightened at the name, though he'd never met the man, only heard the stories secondhand through the same gossip network that had delivered him her employment history. "I should've called before that," he said. "Before all that happened. Maybe you wouldn't have—" "Marcus." "I'm just saying—" "Don't." He stopped. The bar noise filled the gap where his sentence would've gone—someone's laugh two tables over, the clink of glasses, the low hum of a radio Silas kept tuned to some jazz station that never seemed to play anything Rory recognised. "I'm not the guy who fixes things by showing up eight years late," he said finally. "I know that." "No. You're the guy in the suit who found a girl behind a bar and felt sorry for her." "That's not—" "Isn't it?" He looked at his drink instead of at her, and for a moment he seemed younger than he had walking through the door, younger than his suit and his Singapore stories and his careful spine. "I missed you," he said. "That's all. I saw the sign outside—I didn't even know this was your place, I was meeting a client two doors down and saw the green neon and thought, that's exactly the kind of place Rory would end up owning." "I don't own it." "You know what I mean." She did. She wiped the bar top again, though it didn't need it, giving her hands something to do that wasn't reaching across the space between them. "It's good to see you," she said, and meant it, even through the ache of it, even through the strange grief of realising the boy who'd shared cider on a rooftop had become a man she'd have to get to know all over again, if she wanted to know him at all. "You too," he said. "Even like this. Even—" he gestured at the bar, at her apron, at the version of her life he hadn't expected to find. "Even like this," she agreed, and poured herself a drink for the first time that night, because some reunions needed one.