Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9P8SSEKQNH64C54D8SDNR

The rain had followed her in, and it clung to her collar as Rory shouldered through the door of the Raven's Nest, shaking droplets onto the mat like a dog. Above the bar, the green neon sign buzzed faintly through the window, casting its sickly glow across the wet pavement outside. Inside, it was warm and low-lit, smelling of oak and lime peel and the particular must of old paper, from all those maps pinned crookedly to the walls, their edges curling with age. She'd meant to just grab her post from behind the bar — Silas had a habit of collecting her deliveries when she wasn't home — and go straight up to the flat. It had been a long day of ferrying dumplings through Soho traffic, and her knees ached with the particular fatigue of London pavement. She didn't expect to see a ghost sitting at the far end of the bar. "Mai?" The woman turned on her stool, and for a moment Rory thought she'd made a mistake — the woman's hair was different, cropped short and threaded with the beginnings of grey at the temples, and there was a hardness to her jaw that hadn't been there before. But then she smiled, and it was unmistakably Mairwen Hughes, the same crooked smile that used to appear over lecture notes in the Cardiff University library, the same gap between her front teeth. "Rory bloody Carter." Mai's voice hadn't changed at all — still that soft Valleys lilt, warm as a kettle on the boil. "I thought that was you crossing the street. I said to myself, no, can't be, she's got a different name now, hasn't she—" "How did you—" Rory stopped, laughed, shook her head. It had been what, six years? Seven? Not since the last week of second year, before everything with Evan, before she'd stopped answering calls, stopped being findable at all. "God. Mai. What are you doing in London?" "Conference, if you can believe it. Some tedious thing about maritime law. I saw the sign outside — thought, well, that's a decent-looking bar, and I could do with a proper drink after four hours of contract clauses." Mai gestured at the stool beside her. "Sit. Unless you're working." "I live upstairs," Rory said, and immediately regretted the way it sounded — vague, evasive, the sort of thing she'd trained herself to say without saying anything at all. Mai's eyebrows lifted slightly, but she didn't push. That had always been her way — patient, observant, willing to let silences do the asking. It was probably why she'd have made a decent barrister, if that was still what she was doing. Rory settled onto the stool anyway, feeling the weight of the last several years pressing down on her shoulders like a coat she couldn't take off. "You cut your hair," Mai said. "You didn't." "Ha. No. Some things don't change." Mai took a sip of her drink — whisky, neat, which surprised Rory, because Mai had never touched anything stronger than cider in university. "You look well, though. Different. Good different, I think. Harder to say." "It's been a while." "It has." Mai turned her glass slowly on the bar, watching the light catch in it. "I looked for you, you know. After. When you stopped picking up. I went round to the flat you shared with Evan, and he said you'd moved out, wouldn't say where, and then your mam said the same, and I thought — well. I thought maybe you didn't want to be found." The words landed somewhere under Rory's ribs, quiet and precise, the way old wounds do when pressed just right. She thought of Evan's hands, of the flat in Cardiff with its damp corner by the window, of Eva's voice on the phone saying *come to London, Ror, just come, I've got a sofa and a job lined up.* She thought of all the versions of herself she'd worn since then — Rory the delivery girl, Aurora the name on her birth certificate, Laila when Silas needed her to be someone else entirely, Malphora when the job called for something colder still. "I didn't," she said finally. "Want to be found. Not by anyone from before." Mai nodded slowly, as if she'd expected that answer and had simply been waiting to hear it confirmed. "I figured as much, in the end. Heard some things, after. About him. I'm sorry, Rory. I should have looked harder." "You couldn't have known." "I could have asked better questions." Mai's jaw tightened, just slightly, the same way it used to when she lost an argument in seminar and refused to let it go quietly. "We used to talk about everything. Or I thought we did." Rory looked at her — really looked, the way she'd trained herself to look at marks and contacts and men who might be lying to her, cataloguing the small tells, the things people didn't mean to show. Mai's nails were bitten short despite the expensive-looking coat, the wedding ring loose enough to spin, the tiredness around her eyes that had nothing to do with maritime law. Some things, apparently, didn't change, and some things changed so quietly you almost missed it. "We were twenty," Rory said. "Nobody tells anyone everything at twenty." "No," Mai agreed. "I suppose not." She looked at Rory for a long moment, and there was something searching in it, something that wanted an answer Rory wasn't sure she could give — not tonight, not to someone who still remembered her as a girl arguing about tort law over cheap wine, who didn't know about the back room behind the bookshelf, or the things Silas had taught her to do with a knife, or the names she wore like coats she could shed at will. "You could tell me now, though. If you wanted." "I don't know where I'd start." "Start anywhere," Mai said. "I've got nowhere to be." But behind the bar, Silas caught Rory's eye — a small, deliberate glance, the kind that meant *later, we have business* — and Rory felt the old life and the new one collide in her chest, felt the impossible weight of trying to be both women at once, the girl who'd once known exactly who she was and the woman who now wasn't sure the truth would fit through the door. "Another time," she said softly, and hated herself a little for how easily the lie came. "I promise." Mai's smile didn't waver, but her eyes did, just slightly — the particular sadness of someone who has heard that promise before and knows, somehow, that it will not be kept.