Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9W1GDBAVNCJNXZZ5A572G

The green neon sign buzzed above the door when Rory pushed through it, shaking rain from her jacket. Six deliveries in an hour and a half, and her phone had died somewhere between the third and fourth flat, so she'd navigated the last two by memory and swearing. Silas looked up from behind the bar, one eyebrow raised at the state of her. "Golden Empress giving you trouble again?" "The lift in Berwick House is broken. Fourth floor, no lift, extra spicy Szechuan chicken that somehow leaked through the bag." She dropped onto a stool and let her head fall back. The bar smelled like it always did—old wood, spilled whisky, the faint ghost of cigarette smoke that had seeped into the walls decades before smoking bans existed. Silas set a glass of water in front of her without being asked, which was the closest thing to sympathy he offered most days. That was when she heard the laugh. It came from a booth near the back, low and rough, nothing like the laugh Rory remembered—bright, unguarded, the kind that used to get them both kicked out of lectures. She turned, and the woman in the booth turned too, and for a second neither of them said anything at all. "Ffion?" "Christ. Rory Carter." Ffion Pryce stood, and the movement was slower than Rory remembered, careful, like her body had learned caution somewhere along the way. She'd cut her hair short, cropped close to her skull, and there was grey threading through the dark brown of it that had no business being there. Not at twenty-six. Her eyes, though—those hadn't changed. Still that same restless green, still looking for the exit before she'd even settled into a room. "God, look at you," Ffion said, closing the distance, and the hug she gave was brief, almost formal, nothing like the way they used to hold onto each other outside exam halls. "London agrees with you." "Does it?" "You look—" Ffion stepped back, studied her like she was reading a report. "Solid. Sturdy. I don't know. Older." "Cheers." "I meant it as a compliment." Rory gestured at the stool beside her, and Ffion sat, and Silas, without a word, poured her something amber and set it down. Ffion nodded her thanks without really seeing him, which told Rory this wasn't her first drink of the evening. "What are you doing in London?" Rory asked. "Last I heard you were still in Cardiff, doing the session work, the recording gigs." "That fell apart. Ages ago now." Ffion turned the glass in slow circles on the bar top. "I do sound engineering. Corporate stuff, mostly. Conference AV, that sort of thing. Pays better than gigging ever did." "You hated corporate stuff." "I hated being broke more." The words came out flat, no bitterness in them, which was somehow worse than if there had been. Rory remembered the Ffion who used to sleep in her car outside Cardiff Bay so she could afford strings for her guitar, who used to talk about session work like it was a stepping stone to something enormous. She didn't ask what had happened to the enormous thing. She could see the answer sitting in front of her, nursing a whisky at half past nine on a Tuesday. "You still play?" "When there's time." Ffion's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "There's never time." "You used to say you'd rather die than work a desk job." "I remember." Ffion looked at her sideways. "I remember a lot of things I used to say." Something passed between them then, quick and unspoken, and Rory felt the old guilt rise in her chest before she could stop it. Three years of silence sat between them, unaccounted for, and neither of them had been the one to break it until tonight, until chance had dropped them into the same room. "I should have called," Rory said. "After everything with Evan. I just—I disappeared. I know I disappeared." "You had your reasons." Ffion's voice was careful now, the caution she'd carried into the hug returning. "I heard some of it. Through Bronwyn, through people. I figured you needed the space." "I needed a lot of things. Space wasn't really one of them." "Then why didn't you call?" The question landed harder than Ffion probably meant it to. Rory turned her water glass, watched the condensation bead and slide. "Because calling meant admitting how bad it had gotten. And you'd have wanted to fix it. You always wanted to fix things." "Somebody had to." "I know." Rory looked up. "I know, Ffi. I just wasn't ready to be fixed yet." Ffion nodded slowly, and for a moment the years between them didn't feel quite so vast—just two people who'd once known each other completely and now had to relearn the shape of that knowing. Silas moved down the bar to serve someone else, giving them the illusion of privacy that the Nest was built for. "Are you ready now?" Ffion asked. "Fixed, I mean." "Different question. Different answer, probably." Rory thought of Silas' back room, of the things she'd learned to do that had nothing to do with delivering Chinese food. "I'm not who I was. That's the most I can tell you." "No." Ffion studied her again, that same reading-a-report look. "No, you're not." "Are you?" Ffion laughed, short and without much humour in it, and knocked back the rest of her whisky. "I'm exactly who I was. Just tireder. And with worse hair." "Your hair's fine." "It's grey, Rory." "It's distinguished." "It's grey because I spent two years arguing with sound boards for corporate conferences instead of writing anything worth a damn." Ffion set the glass down harder than necessary. "That's not distinguished. That's just what happens when you stop." Rory didn't have an answer for that. She thought about her own stopping and starting, the version of herself she'd left behind in Cardiff, the version Ffion was looking at now and trying to reconcile with someone she used to know completely. Silas caught her eye from down the bar, some silent question in his face, and she shook her head slightly. Not yet. "One more?" she asked instead, nodding at Ffion's empty glass. "Go on, then." Ffion pushed it across the bar. "For old times." "For old times," Rory agreed, though neither of them said which times they meant, and neither of them asked.