Run: 2026-07-01-01KWEAB17Z5BT57Q8NMMRRXVGN

The green neon sign buzzed against the window, throwing its usual sickly glow across the wet pavement. Rory sat at the far end of the bar, peeling the label off a bottle of Peroni with her thumbnail, waiting for her shift at the Golden Empress to properly end in her head even though her body had clocked off an hour ago. Silas was restocking the shelf behind her, muttering about a delivery of gin that hadn't shown, when the door swung open and let in a gust of cold October air. Rory didn't look up until she heard the voice. "Rory Carter. As I live and breathe." She turned, and for a second the name didn't attach itself to a face she recognised. The woman standing in the doorway wore a coat that looked expensive in the way that tried too hard, and her hair, once a wild copper mess that Rory remembered braiding at three in the morning during exam term, hung flat and bleached at the ends. Then the smile arrived, crooked on the left side the way it always had been, and the years folded back. "Meg?" "Don't sound so shocked. I do still exist." Meg crossed the room and sat on the stool beside her without asking, the way she used to slide into any space like she'd been invited. Silas glanced over, caught Rory's eye, and busied himself with the gin order that hadn't come. "God. Meg Ferris. What are you even doing in Soho?" "Client dinner. Ran long, ran dry, needed a real drink after." Meg waved two fingers at Silas. "Whatever's brown and expensive." "You're still doing the law thing, then." "Still doing the law thing." Meg said it like a diagnosis. "Corporate, now. Mergers. I sit in rooms with men who've never carried their own bags and I tell them how to buy each other's companies without going to prison." "Sounds thrilling." "It pays for the coat." Meg pinched the lapel between two fingers, let it fall. "You always did have a mouth on you. I used to love that about you. Everyone else in our year was so bloody earnest." Silas set the whisky down without a word and drifted off toward the till, giving them room. "I thought about you a lot, actually," Meg said, turning the glass but not drinking. "After you dropped out. Everyone said you'd gone off with some bloke, that you'd thrown the whole degree away for him." "That's the short version." "Is there a long version?" Rory picked at the label again. "There's a version where I got out before it got worse. That's the only version I tell anymore." Meg's face did something complicated, a flicker of the old softness underneath something harder that had grown over it like scar tissue. "I heard bits. Eva mentioned something once, at a wedding. I should've called." "You had exams." "I had exams for six years, Rory. That's not an excuse, that's just what happened instead of being a friend." The admission sat between them, unglamorous and plain. Rory turned her bottle in a slow circle on the bar top. "You were going to be a judge," she said. "You used to say it like it was already true." "I remember." Meg laughed, but there wasn't much behind it. "Lord Justice Ferris. God, we were arrogant." "You're not arrogant now." "No." Meg looked at her drink instead of at Rory. "Turns out being brilliant at nineteen doesn't buy you anything at thirty-one except a corner office and a marriage that lasted four years and eleven days. I counted, once. Sad, isn't it, counting." "I'm sorry." "Don't be. You didn't do it." Meg took the whisky in one go, set the glass down harder than she needed to. "What about you, then? Last I heard you were somewhere in London working odd jobs, and I thought, God, what a waste, she had the best mind in the cohort and she's delivering pizzas." "Chinese food, actually. And I like it. I like the woman I work for. I like the bloke who owns this place." Rory nodded toward Silas, who was pretending very hard not to listen from the other end of the bar. "It's not what anyone pictured. But nobody's trying to bury me under paperwork, and nobody's telling me who to be." "That's not nothing," Meg said, and for a moment something like envy crossed her face, quick and unwelcome, like she hadn't meant to let it show. "I used to think you'd thrown your life away leaving Cardiff. Now I look at you and you seem more like yourself than I remember. That's the annoying part." "You look tired, Meg." "I am tired. Bone tired. The kind you don't sleep off." She turned the empty glass in her hands, studying it as if it might refill on its own. "We used to talk about this, remember? Sitting on your floor with a bottle of cheap wine, saying we'd never become the kind of people who forgot each other over a job. And then I did exactly that. I became precisely the thing we swore we wouldn't." "You didn't forget. You're sitting here." "I'm sitting here because I recognised the back of your head through a window and couldn't make myself walk past." Meg's voice cracked at the edges, just slightly, the crack of someone who hadn't let it show in a long time. "That's not the same as ten years of not calling." Rory didn't have an answer for that, so she didn't offer a false one. She reached over and refilled Meg's glass herself, using the bottle Silas kept behind the bar for regulars, and slid it across. "We're here now," she said. "That's something." Meg looked at the glass, then at her, and something in her shoulders let go, just a fraction, the posture of a woman setting down a bag she'd been carrying too long without noticing the weight. "To wasted potential," she said, lifting it. "To turning out different than we planned." They drank to that instead, and neither of them mentioned how long it might be before they sat like this again, though both of them, in the quiet under the neon buzz, understood the answer without needing to say it aloud.