Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE95BGTD3QM24FS0R44F7Z9

The Raven's Nest smelled the same as it always had—whisky and old paper and the faint char of the fireplace nobody bothered to clean properly. Rory came down from her flat at half nine, hair still damp from the shower, meaning to grab a coffee before her shift at the Golden Empress. Silas was behind the bar polishing a glass that didn't need polishing, the way he did when he wanted an excuse to watch the door. She almost didn't recognise the man sitting at the far end. "Tommy?" He turned, and for a second his face did nothing at all, like he was sorting through a filing cabinet of names before landing on hers. Then something loosened in his jaw. "Rory Carter. Christ." He'd put on weight, but not the comfortable kind. It sat wrong on him, like clothes borrowed from someone larger. His hair, once a mess of sandy curls he was always pushing out of his eyes, had thinned to grey wisps combed flat against his scalp. The last time she'd seen him he was twenty-two, laughing too loud in a Cardiff kitchen, spilling cheap wine on her mother's tablecloth. "What—" She sat on the stool beside him without asking. "What are you doing in London?" "Live here now. Three years." He lifted his glass, some amber liquid gone mostly to ice. "You?" "Bit longer than that." Silas set a coffee in front of her without being asked, hovered a beat too long, then drifted to the other end of the bar to let them talk. Rory caught his eye. He gave her nothing, just that careful neutral look he wore when he was reading a room. "You look well," Tommy said, and it came out flat, rehearsed, like a line he'd practiced on the tube. "You look—" She stopped herself. "Go on. Say it." "Tired," she said, because it was truer than whatever she'd almost said instead. He laughed, short and without much behind it. "Yeah. That's the word people use now instead of the real one." "What's the real one?" "Doesn't matter." He turned the glass in slow circles on the bar top. "You still with Evan?" The name landed like a dropped plate. She hadn't heard anyone say it in over a year, not since she'd scrubbed his number, his photos, the sound of his voice from every corner of her life she could reach. "No," she said. "That ended a while back." "Good." He said it too quickly, too sharp, and something in his face flickered—an old anger surfacing before he could stop it. "He was a prick. I always thought so." "You never said." "Wasn't my business." He drank. "Should've said it anyway." She wrapped both hands around the coffee mug, feeling the heat bleed into her palms. Outside, someone laughed on the pavement, the sound muffled through the Nest's thick windows. "What happened to the band?" she asked, because she needed somewhere else to put the conversation. "You and Deio and that drummer, whatever his name was—" "Gareth." Tommy's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Band broke up. Deio's an accountant now. Married, two kids, lives in Penarth. Sends a Christmas card every year with a photo of the kids in matching jumpers." He said it like the words tasted bad going down. "I saw him last spring. Took him ten minutes to remember which song I used to sing." "You wrote most of them." "Did I?" He looked at her properly then, and there was something underneath the joke, something that had gone hollow and hadn't been filled back in. "Feels like someone else's life when I think about it now." She didn't know what to say to that, so she didn't say anything, just let the silence sit while Silas moved a crate of bottles behind the bar with more noise than necessary, giving them privacy dressed up as work. "What do you do?" she asked eventually. "Now, I mean." "Warehouse. Logistics, they call it. Sounds better than it is." He shrugged, and the gesture seemed to cost him something. "Pays the rent. Some of it." "And the rest of it?" He looked at his glass instead of her. "There's a bookies two streets from where I live. Funny how that works out." Rory felt the old instinct rise in her, the one that used to make her stay up till three in the morning talking him down from whatever he'd got himself into back at university, back when it was still recoverable, still small enough to fix with a good talking-to and a strong coffee. "Tommy—" "Don't." He held up a hand, not unkindly. "I know what you're going to say. I've heard it. From my sister, from my mum, from a bloke at a meeting who smelled like he hadn't washed since the Blair years." He finally smiled, and for a second the old Tommy surfaced underneath the wreckage, the one who used to climb through her window at midnight with a six-pack because he couldn't sleep and didn't want to be alone with it. "I didn't come in here for that." "Why did you come in?" "Passing through. Saw the sign." He gestured vaguely at the green neon glowing faint through the window, the letters backwards from inside. "Reminded me of a place we used to go. The Boar's Head, remember? On Wellfield Road?" "They knocked it down. Flats there now." "Course they did." He said it without surprise, like he'd expected the whole city to have quietly erased itself while he wasn't looking. "Everything's flats now." She thought of Cardiff, of her parents' house, of the girl she'd been who thought Pre-Law was a life sentence and Tommy's guitar was the sound of freedom. That girl felt as distant now as he apparently felt from himself. "I should get to work," she said, though her coffee was still half full and she had twenty minutes to spare. "Course." He didn't move to stop her, didn't ask for her number, and she found she didn't offer it either. Some doors you left shut because opening them meant admitting how much dust had gathered on the other side. "It was good seeing you, Tommy." "Yeah." He turned back to his glass, and whatever had opened in his face while they talked closed again, folded away neat as a letter he didn't want read twice. "You too, Rory." She stood, and Silas caught her eye as she passed the bar, said nothing, just gave her the smallest nod, the kind that meant *I saw that, and I'm sorry, and there's nothing either of us can do about it.* She didn't look back before the door swung shut behind her.