Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE8ZX8YZK1TDJDP86W1G3KR

The Raven's Nest smelled the same as it always had—wood polish and old paper, a hint of cigarette smoke that never quite left the curtains even after Silas banned smoking indoors a decade back. Rory sat at the far end of the bar, nursing a whiskey she wasn't in the mood to finish, when the door opened and let in a gust of October air and a man she hadn't seen in six years. She recognized him before he recognized her. It was something in the set of his shoulders, the way he still checked the room twice before deciding it was safe to walk into it. Marcus. Marcus Webb, who used to sneak into the campus library after hours with her to read case files nobody else cared about, who once drove four hours in the rain to bring her a decongestant because he didn't trust the corner shop's brand. He'd put on weight, and lost hair, and there was something grey around his eyes that had nothing to do with colour. "Rory?" "Marcus." He crossed the room like he wasn't sure his legs would hold the decision. When he got close enough, she saw the tremor in his hand as he pulled out the stool next to hers. "Christ. Rory Carter. In a bar in Soho." He laughed, but it came out thin, like he'd forgotten how the sound was supposed to work. "What are the odds." "Small city, big coincidences." She turned her glass a quarter turn on the bar top. "You look—" "Don't." He held up a hand. "Whatever you were about to say, don't." "I was going to say tired." "That works." He signalled to Silas, who was polishing a glass at the other end and watching them both with the particular stillness of a man who noticed everything and revealed nothing. "Whatever she's having." Silas poured without comment, set the glass down, and drifted off toward the far end of the bar to give them room. Rory caught his eye for half a second. He gave her nothing, which was its own kind of answer. "So," Marcus said, wrapping both hands around his glass like it might run off if he let go. "Pre-Law. Did you ever finish?" "No." "No?" He turned to look at her properly now, the old curiosity flickering somewhere under all that tired. "You were going to be a barrister. You had it all mapped out. Chambers by twenty-eight, judge by fifty, terrifying everyone in between." "Things changed." "Things changed," he repeated, like the words tasted strange. "Yeah. I remember things changing." There was a weight in that sentence that hadn't been there a moment before. Rory watched him take a drink, watched his throat work, and thought about the last time she'd seen him—a wedding, not his, some mutual friend's do in a marquee that leaked when it rained, and Marcus had been laughing then, really laughing, with a girl called Priya on his arm. "How's Priya?" she asked, because someone had to say it eventually. "We split up. Three years now." He said it flat, like a fact he'd worn smooth from handling. "You?" "There was someone. Evan." She didn't elaborate, and something in her face must have told him not to ask, because he didn't. "I'm in London now. Have been for a while." "Doing what?" "Delivery driving. Restaurant called the Golden Empress." Marcus blinked at her like she'd spoken in another language. "You were going to argue cases in front of judges." "And you were going to write novels. Real ones. Not the copy you told me you were doing to pay rent until you finished the first draft." That landed somewhere soft. He looked down at his glass, and for a second the tired around his eyes seemed to spread, taking over the rest of his face. "I still write," he said. "Sometimes. Nothing anyone would want to read." "I'd want to read it." "You say that." "I mean it." "You always meant things." He looked up at her, and there was an old ache in it, something from years back that had never quite finished healing. "That was the trouble with you, Rory. You never said anything you didn't mean. Made the rest of us feel like liars." "That's not—" "I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying." He drank again, longer this time. "I used to think about you. After. Wondered if you'd made it to chambers. Wondered if you were terrifying someone in a wig right now." "I'm sorry I didn't call." "You didn't owe me a call." But the way he said it, quick and clipped, suggested he'd rehearsed a different answer once, a long time ago, and this was the version that had survived. "We were kids. Kids drift." "We weren't kids. We were twenty-three." "Same thing, looking back." He turned the glass again, watching the whiskey catch the low light from the bar's green neon sign, filtered in from outside. "You know what the worst part is? I don't even remember why we stopped talking. There wasn't a fight. There wasn't anything. We just—stopped." "I remember why," Rory said. He looked at her. "You got the job in Manchester. I was already halfway out of Cardiff by then. It wasn't dramatic. It was just distance, and then it was more distance, and then it was six years." "That's a very tidy way of saying we let it happen." "Maybe that's worse." "Maybe it is." He finished the drink in one motion and set the glass down harder than he meant to, judging by the small wince that followed. "Can I tell you something? And you have to not make it weird." "I make everything weird. You know this." That got a real laugh out of him, short but real, the first sound all night that sounded like the Marcus she used to know. "I looked you up. Years ago. Couldn't find anything. No socials, nothing. I thought maybe you'd changed your name. Witness protection. Something dramatic, because that's the kind of thing that would happen to you." Rory kept her face still, the old training from another life kicking in before she'd even decided to use it. "Boring reasons," she said. "I just don't do social media." "See, even that's suspicious. Everyone does social media." He was watching her now, really watching, the way he used to when they'd argue theory until two in the morning and he was trying to find the hole in her logic. "You've got a look about you. Like you're somewhere else half the time. You didn't used to have that." "Everyone's somewhere else half the time. It's called being an adult." "No," he said slowly. "It's something else. I don't know what. But you're not just tired, Rory. You're careful. You never used to be careful." Silas appeared at the end of the bar again, unhurried, polishing a glass that was already clean, and Rory felt rather than saw him listening. "It's good to see you, Marcus," she said, and meant it, and let that be the answer to everything else he hadn't quite asked.