Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9KD1TZYWT1VDKPXFHP3VC

The neon sign buzzed green through the window, throwing a sickly glow across the row of bottles behind the bar. Rory wiped down the counter for the third time, more out of habit than need, when the door opened and let in a gust of cold October air and a woman she hadn't seen in six years. "Rory Carter." The woman stopped just inside the doorway, coat still buttoned, eyes doing that thing people's eyes did when they were recalculating everything they thought they knew. "As I live and breathe." Rory's hand stilled on the bar towel. Meg Prosser. Older now, obviously, but it was the stillness that threw her—Meg had never been still in her life. She'd been the girl who talked with her whole body, who filled a lecture hall with laughter just by walking in. "Meg." Rory came around the bar, unsure whether a hug was owed or wanted. "What the hell are you doing in Soho?" "Conference. Boring corporate law thing." Meg unbuttoned her coat slowly, like she was buying time to look at Rory properly. "I didn't know you worked in a bar." "I don't, exactly. I live upstairs. Help out some nights." "Right." Meg took a stool, set her bag down with the precision of someone used to expensive things. "Last I heard you were finishing your law degree. Prosecution track, you said. You were going to eat barristers alive." Rory poured two whiskies without being asked, because some things you remembered even after six years—Meg always drank whisky, neat, like it was a personality trait rather than a preference. "Things changed." "Things change." Meg turned the glass without drinking. Her nails were done, Rory noticed, a pale shade that probably had a name like "quiet luxury." "You disappeared, Ror. One day you're posting about mooting competitions, next day nothing. No calls. I rang your mum, she said you'd moved to London, wouldn't say why." "There wasn't a reason worth explaining over the phone." "There's always a reason." Rory leaned against the bar, feeling the old defensiveness climb up her spine, the same one that used to flare when her mother asked too many questions. "How's the practice going? You made partner, I saw. Prosser and someone." "Prosser, Higham and Ling. Yeah." Meg said it flat, no pride in it, which surprised Rory more than the announcement itself. "Forty-one years old and I've got my name on a building in Canary Wharf. Feels like someone else's achievement half the time." "Must be nice, though. The money." "The money's nice." Meg finally drank, wincing slightly. "The rest of it—" She didn't finish the sentence, just gestured vaguely with the glass, as if the rest of it existed somewhere in the space between them. Rory studied her old friend's face, trying to find the girl who'd once climbed through her dorm window at 2am with a bottle of cheap cider because they'd had a row about nothing and Meg refused to let a fight sit overnight. That girl's eyes were still there, somewhere behind the fine lines and the expensive concealer, but she'd learned to keep them guarded. Lawyer's eyes now. Careful eyes. "You look tired," Rory said. "You look different." Meg's gaze swept over her, cataloguing. "Thinner. Your hair's shorter." "Life happened." "That's not an answer, that's a deflection. You used to be terrible at deflecting, you know. Straight A student, straight talker. What happened to you, Ror?" Rory picked up a glass that didn't need cleaning and cleaned it anyway. Behind her, one of the regulars laughed too loud at something on the telly mounted in the corner, and for a second she was grateful for the noise, the excuse not to answer immediately. "There was someone," she said finally. "Evan. It got bad. I left." Meg's face did something complicated—concern warring with the careful blankness she'd probably practiced in a hundred client meetings. "Bad how?" "Bad enough that I don't talk about it in bars." "Fair." Meg nodded slowly, accepting the boundary the way lawyers accepted objections, with a kind of professional grace that still managed to sting. "I'm sorry. I wish you'd called. I would have—" "Would have what? Flown in from wherever you were and sorted it out with a strongly worded letter?" It came out sharper than she meant. Meg's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Maybe. I don't know. Something. Anything would've been better than six years of silence and finding out by accident that you're pulling pints in Soho." "I'm not pulling pints. I deliver Chinese food for a living, mostly. This is just—" Rory gestured at the bar, at the maps on the walls, at the whole strange life she'd built out of the wreckage of the one she'd planned. "This is just where I ended up." "You had a five-year plan, Rory. I remember it. Bar exam by twenty-six, junior position by twenty-seven—" "People change their plans." "Some people get their plans taken from them." Meg said it quietly, and for a moment the careful lawyer's face slipped, and Rory saw something underneath it that looked almost like grief. "I think about that sometimes. How much of what we become is choice, and how much is just—damage. Rerouting." Rory didn't answer. Outside, a bus hissed past the window, and somewhere behind the bar Silas moved through the back room, his slight limp audible even through the wall, a familiar rhythm she'd learned to find comforting. "I'm not unhappy," she said eventually. "That's the thing people never believe, but it's true. I'm not who I was going to be. But I'm not unhappy." "I believe you." Meg finished her whisky, set the glass down with a small, definitive click. "I just wish I'd known. That's all. I wish I'd been someone you called." "I wish a lot of things, Meg." They sat with that for a moment, the space between them thick with all the years and phone calls that never happened, all the versions of themselves that had drifted apart without ceremony, without a single goodbye to mark it. "Another?" Rory asked, lifting the bottle. Meg glanced at her watch, then at the door, then back at Rory with something unreadable crossing her face. "Yeah," she said. "One more. For old times."