Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEA697NGJEG7YJNHFPPFHGP

The rain had turned Soho into a smear of neon and wet pavement, and Rory ducked through the door of The Raven's Nest with a delivery bag from the Golden Empress still slung over her shoulder, dumplings gone cold twenty minutes ago because Mrs. Cheung's usual customer hadn't answered his buzzer. She'd give it another few minutes before she called it a loss. The bar was quiet for a Tuesday, just the low murmur of the jukebox and the click of Silas racking glasses behind the counter, his silver ring catching the amber light. She almost didn't see the woman at the end of the bar. Almost walked past her the way she walked past most people now, cataloguing exits before faces. But something made her look twice — the particular way the woman held her glass, thumb hooked over the rim like she was strangling it, a habit Rory hadn't seen in six years and hadn't known she'd remembered until this exact moment. "Bethan?" The woman turned, and for a second neither of them said anything. Bethan Pryce looked older in the way people look older who have spent a decade being tired rather than a decade being lived — soft where she used to be sharp, her hair darker at the roots than the ends, like she couldn't be bothered to keep up the dye job anymore. But her eyes were the same, and they went wide with something that might have been delight or might have been alarm. "Rory Carter." She said it like a verdict. "God. Look at you." "Look at *me*?" Rory set the delivery bag down on the stool beside her, feeling suddenly, absurdly self-conscious. "You're the one who vanished off the face of the earth. Last I heard you were in Manchester." "Manchester, then Leeds, then back to Cardiff for a bit, then here, apparently, since June." Bethan gestured vaguely, as if the last six years could be summed up in the wave of a hand. "You still owe me forty quid, by the way. From that weekend in Bristol." "I do not." "You absolutely do." But she was smiling now, and it cracked something open in her face that made her look, briefly, twenty again, sitting cross-legged on Rory's dorm floor with a bottle of cheap wine and a philosophy essay neither of them had started. "Sit down. Have a drink. Let me pretend the last six years didn't happen." Rory glanced toward the bar, where Silas was watching her with the particular stillness he got when he was deciding whether to intervene. She gave him a small shake of her head — *it's fine* — and he went back to his glasses, though she knew he'd be listening anyway. He always was. She sat. "So," Bethan said, once the barman — not Silas, one of the younger ones — had brought Rory a whisky she hadn't ordered but somehow needed. "London. Since when?" "A few years now." "And what, you just — what do you do?" "Deliveries, mostly. Chinese food." It wasn't a lie. It also wasn't the whole truth, and she felt the familiar practiced ease of saying half of something and letting the rest sit in shadow. "It pays the rent." "Deliveries." Bethan turned the word over like it didn't fit right in her mouth. "You were going to be a barrister. Your dad's firm, the whole—" She made a gesture that Rory supposed was meant to encompass wigs and gavels and a version of Rory that existed only in Cardiff, in old photographs, in the mouths of people who hadn't seen her since. "Things changed." "Things changed," Bethan repeated, and there was something careful in the way she said it, like she was testing the weight of the sentence to see if it would hold more than Rory intended. "Is this about Evan?" The name landed like a dropped glass. Rory kept her face still — she'd gotten good at that, better than good — but her fingers tightened around the whisky. "Sorry," Bethan said quickly. "I shouldn't have — I just. I always wondered. You disappeared so fast. One week you were at Sioned's birthday and the next you weren't answering anyone, and then Eva said you'd gone to London and that was that. Nobody heard anything for months." "I was going through some things." "I know. I mean — I didn't *know*, nobody would tell me anything, but I knew *something* was wrong. I should have come after you. I think about that sometimes. That I let you just — go." Rory looked at her old friend's face, at the genuine ache there, unpolished by anything, and felt the strange vertigo of being looked at by someone who still expected her to be soft in the places she used to be soft. Bethan didn't know about the flat above the bar, or the hidden room behind the bookshelf, or the things Rory had learned to do with a blade in the dark that had nothing to do with delivering dumplings. Bethan knew a girl who cried during storms and hated confrontation and once threw up before a court moot because she was so afraid of being watched. That girl was still in here somewhere. Rory just wasn't sure how much of her was left, or whether what had grown up around her was armor or replacement. "You couldn't have done anything," she said finally. "It wasn't your fault." "Doesn't stop me feeling it." Bethan turned her glass again, that same strangling grip. "You look different, you know. Not just — older. Different. Harder, maybe. I don't know. Like you've seen something the rest of us haven't." Rory almost laughed — not from humor, but from the sheer accuracy of it landing somewhere she didn't expect to be hit. "Maybe I have." "Are you happy?" It was such a plain question, asked with such plain hope, that Rory didn't have an answer ready-made the way she usually did. She thought of Silas watching her from behind the bar, of the quiet danger that had become the architecture of her days, of how rarely anymore she thought of Cardiff at all. "I'm alive," she said. "Some days that feels like the same thing." Bethan didn't push. She'd never been the pushing kind — that had always been Rory's job, back when Rory had still believed most problems could be solved by asking the right question loudly enough. Instead she reached over and put her hand briefly over Rory's, the way she used to when they were nineteen and everything felt enormous and temporary all at once. "Well," she said. "I'm glad you're alive, then." Outside, the rain kept falling against the green neon of the sign, turning the whole street the color of something submerged.