Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8WC2DAQDRG2A5MC8F1YJP

The rain had followed Rory in from the street, beading on her jacket, dripping onto the scarred wood floor as she shouldered the door of The Raven's Nest shut behind her. She smelled of ginger and soy sauce, the last delivery bag from the Golden Empress folded under her arm, empty now except for a receipt gone soft with damp. She wanted nothing more than the stool at the end of the bar, a whisky Silas wouldn't charge her for, and twenty minutes of silence before she went upstairs to sleep. She got three steps in before she saw her. Catrin Pryce was sitting at a table near the window, turning a glass of red wine in slow circles, her dark curls pulled back the way they always had been for exams, for interviews, for anything that mattered. She hadn't changed — that was the first thing Rory's mind registered, an almost physical jolt, like missing a stair. The same round face, the same gold hoops in her ears, the same crease between her eyebrows when she was thinking too hard about something. Six years dissolved in the time it took Rory's stomach to drop. Catrin looked up. For a moment there was nothing — a stranger's polite disinterest — and then recognition broke over her face like weather changing. "Aurora?" she said, and stood so fast she nearly upended the table. "Aurora Carter?" Rory's hand tightened on the strap of the delivery bag. Nobody called her that anymore, not in London, not the way Catrin said it — full name, both syllables of the surname, like a roll call from a lecture hall in Cardiff. "Catrin." She made herself smile. It came easier than she expected, and that surprised her too. "God. It's been — " "Years." Catrin was already crossing the room, arms open, and Rory let herself be hugged, stiffly at first, then not. Catrin smelled of the same drugstore perfume she'd worn at nineteen, something with vanilla in it, and for one disorienting second Rory was back in a shared kitchen on Colum Road, arguing about tort law over cold toast. "What are you even doing here?" Catrin pulled back, held her by the shoulders, studied her the way people did when they were recalibrating an old photograph against a new face. "In London. In a — " she glanced round at the maps on the walls, the black-and-white photographs of men Rory doubted she'd ever be told the names of — "in a place like this." "I live here. Well — above it." Rory gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "Long story." "You look —" Catrin stopped herself, and Rory watched her friend's eyes do the arithmetic: the black hair cut shorter and blunter than it used to be, the leanness in her face that hadn't been there in university, something guarded behind the blue eyes that Catrin couldn't place but clearly registered as loss. "You look well," she said instead, which both of them understood was not what she'd meant to say. They sat. Silas caught Rory's eye from behind the bar, one eyebrow lifting in silent inquiry — trouble? — and she shook her head almost imperceptibly. He went back to polishing a glass that was already clean, but she felt his attention linger, the old habit of a man who had spent thirty years reading rooms for a living. "I'm here for a conference," Catrin said, sliding back into her chair. "Contract law, if you can believe I ended up doing something so boring. Three days of PowerPoints and warm Chardonnay. I saw the green sign from the street and thought, well, it looks like the kind of place that would serve something better than warm Chardonnay." "It does." "So you actually did it," Catrin said. "London. I always thought you would, you know. Even when you were slogging through contracts with the rest of us, hating every second. You never let anyone see you sweat, not really. Not like me." She laughed, a little embarrassed by her own memory. "I used to be so jealous of that." Rory looked down at the table. There was a groove in the wood, worn pale by decades of glasses set down in the same spot. "I didn't finish the degree," she said. "I know. Your mum told my mum. Everyone was so — " Catrin caught herself, softened it. "We worried about you. You just vanished. No calls, nothing on Facebook, and then Eva said you'd gone to London and that was that. I thought you'd hate me for saying this, but I used to lie awake wondering if you were even — " She didn't finish it. "I'm fine," Rory said, too quickly, the way she always said it, the way that made it sound like a door closing rather than an answer. Catrin's eyes dropped, just for a second, to Rory's left wrist, where the crescent scar showed pale against her skin in the low light. She didn't ask. She had never known, in the years they'd shared a kitchen and a laundry rota and secrets about boys, what that scar was from, and Rory had never told her, and there was a whole unspoken history folded into that not-asking now, six years thicker than it had been. "Evan," Catrin said carefully, testing the name like a step that might not hold. "Are you two still — " "No." The word came out flat, final, closing a door that had already been shut a long time. "That ended. A while ago." "Good," Catrin said, and something in her voice suggested she understood more than Rory had given her credit for, that perhaps she'd always understood more than she let on, back when they were girls sharing a fridge and pretending everything was fine. "Good," she said again, softer. The silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable so much as full — full of the versions of themselves that had once sat up until 3 a.m. planning lives that hadn't happened, full of the space between the girl who wanted to be a barrister and the woman who delivered Chinese food and lived above a bar with secrets in its walls, full of everything that six years and one unspoken wound could put between two people who had once known each other completely. "We should get a drink," Catrin said finally, brightening with the particular effort of someone trying to rescue an evening. "For old times. God knows we earned it, that final year." Rory looked at her — really looked, at the face that time hadn't touched the way it had touched her own — and felt something in her chest twist, gently, like an old bruise remembering itself. "Yeah," she said. "Let's."