Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9F3GRR33KJWNCVJEPX9P2

The green neon sign buzzed above the door, casting its sickly glow across the wet pavement, and Ffion almost walked past without looking up. She'd had a rough day chasing sources for a story that kept dissolving in her hands, and the promise of a quiet drink somewhere unfamiliar sounded better than fighting the Tube crowds home. She pushed through the door into the low hum of conversation and the smell of old wood polish. The woman behind the bar had her back turned, reaching for a bottle on the top shelf, black hair catching the amber light. Something in the set of her shoulders made Ffion stop mid-step. "Rory?" The woman turned. For a second nothing showed on her face, then her eyes narrowed the way they used to when she was working out a puzzle in her head. "Ffion. Christ." "You're a bartender now?" Ffion pulled out a stool, though she hadn't been invited to sit. "Last I heard you were drowning in contract law at Cardiff, threatening to set the library on fire." "Things changed." "No kidding." Ffion studied her — the leaner face, the stillness in her that hadn't been there before. Rory used to talk with her hands, used to laugh loud enough that people two tables over would turn and smile without knowing why. This version poured a whisky without spilling a drop and set it down like she'd done it a thousand times before tonight. "You look good," Ffion said, because it was true and because she didn't know what else to say. "You look surprised." "I am surprised. You vanished. No calls, no messages, your mum wouldn't even tell me where you'd gone. I thought — " Ffion stopped herself, turned the glass Rory hadn't given her permission to drink from yet. "I thought maybe something happened to you." "Something did happen to me." Rory said it flat, no drama in it, and that was somehow worse than if she'd cried. Ffion remembered the Rory who cried at adverts, who once sobbed through an entire viewing of a nature documentary because a baby elephant got separated from its herd for four minutes of screen time. This Rory delivered devastating lines like she was reading out a shopping list. "Are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess?" "Depends how many drinks you're buying." "I'm not buying, I'm a guest behind your own bar, apparently." Rory almost smiled then — the corner of her mouth twitched up, and for a second Ffion caught a glimpse of the girl who used to sneak into lectures ten minutes late reeking of cheap cider, laughing about it the whole way to her seat. Then it was gone, tucked back wherever she kept things now. "I left Evan," Rory said, wiping down a spot on the bar that didn't need wiping. "Eva got me out. I came to London, needed work, ended up here." "Evan." Ffion said the name like something bitter left too long on the tongue. "I never liked him. Told you that at the time." "You did." "You didn't listen." "No," Rory agreed. "I didn't." The bar noise swelled around them, someone's laugh cutting through from a corner booth, the clink of glasses being collected. A man with grey-streaked hair and a slight limp moved past behind the counter, said something low to Rory that Ffion didn't catch, and Rory nodded without looking away from her old friend. "You work for him?" Ffion asked once he'd gone. "Silas. Yeah. He owns the place." "And that's it? You just — tend bar now?" Something flickered behind Rory's eyes, quick as a struck match, and Ffion recognised it even after all these years apart — the look Rory used to get when she was deciding how much of the truth to hand over. "There's more to it," Rory said. "But it's not really something I can talk about here." "Cryptic. That's new." "A lot's new." Ffion turned her glass in a slow circle on the bar top, watching the liquid catch the light. She thought about the last real conversation they'd had, three years back now, in a kitchen in Cardiff that smelled of burnt toast, Rory insisting everything with Evan was fine, that Ffion was overreacting, that she didn't understand what it was like to really love someone. Ffion had believed the anger in that conversation was the last thing she'd get from her — better than silence, at least it meant something. Instead she got years of silence, and now this: a stranger wearing her friend's face, pouring drinks with the calm precision of someone who'd learned to control every visible thing about herself. "I missed you," Ffion said, and hated how small it sounded once it was out. "I know." "That's it? I know?" "What do you want me to say, Ffi?" The old nickname came out rough, like it cost something to use it. "That I'm sorry? I am. That I think about calling you? I do, more than you'd believe. But I'm not — " She stopped, glanced down the bar to where a man was trying to flag her for another pint, held up one finger to make him wait. "I'm not the person who'd fit back into that life. I don't think I ever really was." "You don't know that." "I do, actually. That's the whole problem." Rory reached for the bottle again, poured the waiting man's pint with the same economical movement, came back. "You want to know the real thing that's changed? I used to think if I just explained myself well enough, if I found the right words, people would understand and everything would sort itself out. I don't think that anymore." Ffion opened her mouth, then closed it. There wasn't an answer for that; it wasn't the kind of thing you argued with. "I should go," she said instead, though she made no move toward her coat. "Probably." Neither of them moved for a long moment, the bar around them indifferent to the small wreckage happening at one corner of it, the neon sign outside still buzzing its tired green light into the dark. Ffion finished the whisky she'd never technically been given, set the glass down with a soft click, and thought that this — whatever this had become — was the closest thing to an ending she was likely to get. "It was good seeing you," she said, and stood before either of them could decide it wasn't true.