Run: 2026-07-07-01KWZ406D2VYZ3PNTFQ5SZWCJ6

The green neon of The Raven's Nest bleeding through rain-slicked glass was the only honest light in the room. Midweek, just past eleven, when the stragglers had gone home and the floorboards could breathe again. Aurora had been alone with her whiskey for an hour, watching the clock hands crawl toward closing, when the bells above the door chimed. The woman who stepped through shook rain from her coat with practiced economy, and everything about her was tailored to precision. Dark wool fell from shoulders that knew how to carry a briefcase. Heels that cost more than two months of rent clicked against the scarred floorboards. The hair that framed her face was cut into a bob that screamed efficiency, success, the kind of life that woke up early and never doubted itself. Recognition came in stages. The tilt of the chin. The way she scanned a room like she owned it. The hands that checked the collar of her coat as though checking for dust. Megan Price. The name landed in Aurora's chest like a stone dropped into still water. "Rory?" Megan's voice cut through the dim light. Her mouth fell open. "Jesus Christ." Six years since Cardiff. Six years since the mouldy flat on Colum Road and the cheap wine that tasted like regret and possibility in equal measure. Six years since Aurora had seen a woman who remembered who she was supposed to be. "Meg." Aurora's voice came out rougher than she intended. Megan crossed the room without waiting for permission. Her heels made steady counts against the wood, and she pulled out the stool beside Aurora's like she'd been sitting in this bar every night for the past decade. Her coat fell open to reveal a cream blouse unbuttoned at the collar, gold at her wrist, an air of having arrived. "What are you doing here?" Megan asked. "I live upstairs." The crease between Megan's eyebrows deepened. "Above a bar." "It's a long story." Megan laughed, and the sound was hollow, the laugh of someone who had walked into the wrong room and was trying to make it polite. "I'm in London for a case. Deposition tomorrow at the Royal Courts. Saw the sign, thought it looked like a dive." She gestured around the dim room, at the maps with curling edges, the black-and-white photographs fixed in their frames. "Didn't expect to find Cardiff's most promising dropout." Aurora set her glass down. The whiskey sloshed against the sides. "I dropped out." "I know." "I mean I dropped out. Entirely. I'm not a lawyer, Meg. I'm not anything." The mask slipped. For a moment Megan was twenty years old again, sitting cross-legged on a stained sofa with a napkin spread between them, Griffin's cheapest pinot grigio swimming in their glasses. They'd written the whole thing out in smudged biro. Plans. Promises. A future with sharp corners and defined edges. "Do you remember the napkin?" Aurora asked. Megan's face did something complicated. "I found it last year. Going through boxes in my parents' attic." "You kept it?" "I tried to throw it out. Couldn't bring myself to." Megan's voice dropped. "It said we'd open a firm together. Price and Carter. Criminal defence and civil rights. We'd get an office with a harbour view." "Don't let life get in the way." Aurora spoke the last line from memory. The silence between them stretched like cooling metal. Megan looked at Aurora properly then, really looked, and Aurora watched her take in the delivery jacket draped over the stool beside her. The grease mark on her jeans from a dropped order of salt and pepper chips. The crescent scar on her wrist that she'd never explained to anyone who hadn't been there when she got it. "What happened, Aurora?" Megan's use of her full name felt like a door closing. Aurora thought of Evan. The way his voice had gone flat. The way he'd started counting her mistakes on his fingers. The night she'd left with a suitcase that held the wrong clothes and thirty-one pounds and Eva's number scribbled on a receipt. "Life happened." Megan waited, but Aurora didn't fill the silence. "I've asked myself," Megan said slowly, turning her glass, "if I ever really knew you. The version of you that existed in my head. The one who was going to be a barrister. Who was going to fight for the people no one else fought for." She met Aurora's eyes. "I don't know if that person was ever real." "It was real." Aurora's throat tightened. "She just didn't survive." The words hung between them. Megan's hand was still on her glass, and she traced the rim with her thumb the way she used to do in their flat when she was thinking about something she didn't want to say. "I remember the night you left Evan." Megan's voice was careful. "You called me from the station. You were crying so hard I could barely understand you. You told me you were going to London. That you were going to disappear and become someone else." "I remember." "I waited for you to call back. For weeks. Months. I thought..." Megan stopped. "I thought you'd forgotten me. That I was part of the life you wanted to leave behind." Aurora closed her eyes. "I didn't forget. I couldn't face you. You had the life we'd planned for. The firm. The harbour view. What was I supposed to say? I'm delivering noodles in Soho and living above a bar?" "You could have said anything." "I didn't know how." Megan checked her phone. The screen was dark, and Aurora recognised the gesture for what it was: an exit dressed as a necessity. "I should go," Megan said. "Early start." "Of course." Megan stood, and for a moment she was framed by the green neon, caught between the warm dimness of the bar and the cold wet street. She reached into her coat and pulled out a card. Laid it on the bar beside Aurora's glass. "If you ever want to use it," she said. Aurora looked at the card. White. Clean. The firm's name embossed in silver. Megan Price, it said. Solicitor. Partner. "Goodbye, Rory." "Goodbye, Meg." The bells chimed. The door swung. The green light cut a path through the rain and then snapped shut. Aurora picked up the card. She turned it in her fingers, watching the silver catch the dim light. She could picture the office. The view of the bay. The framed degrees on the wall. The life she had written on a napkin and abandoned on a train platform. She slipped the card into her pocket without reading it again. At the far end of the bar, Silas moved out of the shadows. He set a fresh glass beside her elbow, refilled it from a bottle she hadn't seen him open, and limped back to his corner without a word. Aurora drank. The rain kept falling. The green neon kept burning. And somewhere in the city, Megan Price was walking through the wet streets toward the life they had planned together.