AI The green neon raven above the door had begun to stutter in the rain.
From behind the bar, Aurora watched its sickly light pulse across the wet pavement and thought, not for the first time, that Silas ought to get it fixed before it gave up altogether. The sign had been broken in that particular way for months: one wing clear and sharp, the other blinking in and out of existence. It made the bird seem wounded. It made the entrance look less like a bar in Soho and more like a warning.
Inside, the Raven’s Nest held its usual half-light. Lamps burned low beneath shades the colour of old bruises. Maps crowded the walls—countries divided by borders no one had believed would last, sea routes inked by dead hands—and the black-and-white photographs watched from their frames with a patience that unsettled her if she looked too hard. Men in uniforms. Women smoking in doorways. A bridge in Prague, its stones pale under snow.
Silas stood at the far end of the bar, polishing a tumbler with the slow concentration of a surgeon. His grey-streaked auburn hair caught the lamp glow. His silver signet ring flashed once as he turned the glass.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking up .
“The sign’s dying.”
“It has been dying since 2008.”
“Maybe it wants attention.”
“Then it has chosen the wrong profession.”
Aurora smiled despite herself and stacked a row of clean glasses beneath the counter. Her straight black hair had slipped loose from the clip at the nape of her neck. She tucked it behind one ear, smearing a faint crescent of condensation across the polished wood.
It was near closing, though the Nest had never kept ordinary hours. Two men in rain-dark coats occupied a corner table beneath a map of Eastern Europe, talking in voices too low to catch. An elderly woman with a fox-coloured scarf drank gin at the end of the bar and read the racing pages with solemn concentration. Somewhere in the back, the old fridge motor clicked and groaned.
The front door opened.
A gust of rain came in first, cold and metallic. Then a man stepped beneath the dim yellow light.
Aurora saw the soaked wool of his coat, the bent umbrella in his hand, the dark curl of hair plastered to his forehead. She saw the expensive-looking watch on his wrist, the sharpness of his cheekbones, the small white scar cutting through one eyebrow .
None of it meant anything.
Then he lifted his face.
The glass in her hand slipped.
It struck the rubber mat behind the bar and rolled instead of shattering. Silas glanced at her. Aurora did not move.
The man had stopped just inside the doorway. He was looking at her with the same stunned concentration. His mouth parted slightly .
“Rory?”
The name crossed the room like something thrown.
For one stupid, impossible second, she was sixteen again. Cardiff rain drumming against the windows of the school library. A stolen packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps between them. His handwriting slanting across the margins of her history notes. The two of them lying on their backs in the grass behind the rugby pitch, talking about London as if it were a country they could walk into if they headed east for long enough.
Then the memory broke, and the man before her remained.
“Tom,” she said.
He gave a breathless laugh, though nothing was funny. “Christ.”
Silas set the tumbler down. “You know him?”
“I used to,” Aurora said.
Tom’s eyes flicked over her face, her black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, the slim gold chain at her throat. His gaze paused, almost imperceptibly, on the inside of her left wrist, where the old crescent scar showed pale against her skin.
“You work here?” he asked.
The question landed badly. It had no business doing so, but she heard what sat beneath it anyway. Not accusation, exactly. Surprise. Disappointment, perhaps. Or worse: concern.
“I live upstairs,” she said. “Sometimes I work here.”
“Sometimes,” Silas repeated, dry as dust.
Tom looked past her toward him.
“Silas Blackwood,” Silas said. “Owner.”
“Tom Griffiths.” Tom extended a hand.
Silas regarded it a moment before taking it. “I know.”
Aurora’s head turned sharply .
Tom withdrew his hand. Something wary appeared in his expression.
Silas went back to polishing the glass. “I know everyone who walks through my door.”
“That’s not remotely ominous,” Tom said.
“It isn’t meant to be comforting .”
Aurora should have found that amusing. Instead she could feel her pulse in her throat. “What are you doing in London?”
Tom looked at her again, and his face softened in a way that made her want to look away.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“You could. I asked first.”
For a moment, there he was: the boy who had always smiled when she pushed back, as if her irritation were a private joke between them. But the smile did not quite arrive . It faltered at the edges.
“Work,” he said. “I’m here for work.”
“What kind?”
“Corporate law.”
She blinked.
Tom noticed. “Yes, I know.”
“You hated law.”
“I hated the idea of being my father.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m very good at billing in six-minute increments.”
The elderly woman at the bar called for another gin. Silas moved away to pour it, leaving an uneasy space between Aurora and Tom.
He approached the bar slowly , as though sudden movement might send her running. Up close, he smelled of rain and cedar and something clean, expensive, unfamiliar. He had grown into his body in ways she had not expected. At nineteen, he had been all elbows and restless energy, forever bouncing one knee beneath a table. Now he held himself rigidly still.
“Can I get you something?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed . “You’re serving me?”
“I’m asking what you want to drink, Tom. Don’t make it melodramatic.”
A small breath escaped him. “Whisky, then. Neat.”
She reached for a bottle.
“You still do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Act as if you don’t care when you care very much.”
Her hand paused around the neck of the bottle.
The two men in the corner went quiet. Or perhaps they had always been quiet, and she had only just begun to hear them.
Aurora poured the whisky. Amber caught the low light. She placed it in front of him without meeting his eyes.
“People change,” she said.
“Yes,” Tom said. “They do.”
He took the glass but did not drink.
She hated that she could remember the exact shape of his hands at seventeen: ink on the side of his thumb, bitten nails, the silver ring he had stolen from his sister’s jewellery box and worn for a week until his mother noticed. The hands on the bar now were manicured , broad-knuckled, marked by a pale groove where a wedding ring might once have been.
She looked at it before she could stop herself.
Tom followed her gaze.
“Divorced,” he said.
Aurora’s eyes came back to his face. “I didn’t ask.”
“No. You didn’t.”
Silence opened between them.
He raised the whisky at last, took a swallow, and shut his eyes briefly. “That’s better than anything at the hotel.”
“The hotel bar has less atmosphere.”
“The hotel bar has a pianist playing Coldplay.”
“Then you’ve suffered enough.”
That almost made him laugh. Almost.
Silas came back, rested both hands on the counter. “Aurora, the cellar inventory can wait until tomorrow.”
She knew what he was doing . Giving her an exit. Silas had made a profession of noticing doors people needed before they saw them themselves.
“I’m fine,” she said.
His hazel eyes held hers for a beat. Then he nodded and retreated to the till.
Tom turned the whisky glass slowly between his palms. “I looked for you.”
The room seemed to contract.
Aurora leaned one hip against the back counter. “When?”
“After you left Cardiff.”
She said nothing.
“Your mum said you’d gone to London. Your dad said he didn’t know where. I wrote to the old flat at university, but you’d already moved out.”
“I didn’t get anything.”
“I know that now.”
The words were careful. Too careful. She watched him choose each one.
“You know,” she said, “it’s a bit late to bring it up in a bar.”
“I didn’t bring it up. I walked into a bar because I saw the sign in the rain. You happened to be standing behind it.”
“You saw the sign?”
“The green bird.” His gaze moved toward the window. “I thought it looked familiar .”
“It isn’t familiar .”
“No. But it looked like something you’d choose.”
Aurora folded her arms. The gesture pulled the cuff of her sleeve down over her scar.
“You didn’t look very hard,” she said.
Tom flinched, so slightly another person might not have seen it. But she had known him before he learned to hide things.
“I know,” he said.
The simple agreement took some of the fight from her.
Outside, tyres hissed over rainwater. A couple hurried past the window under a single umbrella, heads bowed together. Aurora watched them until they vanished beyond the frame.
“What happened to you?” Tom asked quietly.
She let out a short laugh. “That’s a broad question.”
“You were going to be a barrister.”
“So were you, apparently.”
“I mean it, Rory.”
The use of her name was gentler than before. She resented that too.
What happened to you? She could have told him about Evan, though she did not use that name much anymore. Could have told him how easily a life narrowed, not all at once, but inch by inch . A correction here. An apology there. Friends who became inconvenient. Phone calls she stopped answering because explaining felt worse than loneliness. The night she had left with a bag that barely closed and forty-three pounds in her account. Eva’s voice on the phone, furious and frightened: Come to London. Now.
Instead she said, “I changed my mind.”
Tom looked at her for a long moment. “Did you?”
Aurora’s temper sparked. “Careful.”
“I’m not trying to—”
“Don’t tell me what I meant. You’ve been here ten minutes.”
“I’m trying to say you look …” He stopped.
“Like what?”
He looked down into his drink. “Like someone who had to become difficult to kill.”
The words struck with such force that for a moment she could not breathe.
Behind her, a bottle touched wood. Silas had set something down. He did not turn around.
Tom’s face had gone pale. “I’m sorry. That was—”
“No,” Aurora said.
He stopped.
She looked at him. Really looked. The tailored coat. The hard line of his jaw. The exhaustion around his eyes that no money or grooming had managed to erase. He had become one of those men who moved through rooms expecting to be listened to. Yet there was something in him that still belonged to the boy beneath the rugby pitch, the boy who had said he would leave Cardiff with her and then, when the time came, had stayed.
“No,” she said again, quieter . “It was accurate.”
Tom swallowed.
“You disappeared,” he said.
“I know.”
“You didn’t tell me why.”
“I couldn’t tell anyone why.”
“You could have told me.”
She felt the old anger then, preserved with astonishing freshness. Not at him, perhaps. At the version of him she had carried for years—the one who had called three times and then stopped, who had let absence harden into history because it was easier than breaking through it.
“I did tell you,” she said. “Not everything. But I told you enough.”
His brows drew together.
“The night before I left,” she said. “I called you.”
Rain ticked against the windows. The green neon wing flashed, vanished, flashed again.
Tom stared at her.
“You said you were at dinner with your parents,” Aurora continued. “You said you’d call me back.”
His face changed.
She knew then that he remembered. Perhaps not the words. Perhaps not the tone of her voice, too bright and controlled. But he remembered the call. He remembered choosing not to step outside.
“Rory,” he said.
“You didn’t.”
“I was twenty-one.”
“So was I.”
“I know.” His fingers closed around the glass until his knuckles whitened. “God, I know.”
The apology sat between them, too late and too small. Aurora did not want it. That was the cruelest thing: some part of her had wanted it for so long that now, offered at last, it felt useless.
“I thought you were angry at me,” he said. “You’d been distant for weeks. Then you were gone. I thought—”
“You thought I’d come back when I was ready to forgive you for something minor.”
“I thought you didn’t need me.”
She looked at him, and something in her expression must have answered, because he shut his eyes.
Silas limped down the bar toward the front door and turned the lock. The click was soft but final. The two men in the corner had already gone; Aurora had not seen them leave. The elderly woman folded her racing pages, drained the last of her gin, and gathered her scarf.
“Closing time,” Silas said.
The woman nodded, left cash beneath her glass, and departed without complaint.
Tom set his whisky down. Most of it remained.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Aurora held his gaze.
This time, there was no defence in him. No polished explanation. Only the raw, unhelpful fact of regret.
“I know,” she said.
It was not forgiveness. He seemed to understand that.
He reached into his coat for his wallet, then paused. “Can I see you again?”
The question made her tired. Not because it was difficult, but because she could see all the paths it opened: coffee in some bright, impersonal place; more apologies; the dangerous sweetness of being known by someone who remembered her before she became watchful. She imagined telling him no. She imagined him nodding, leaving, becoming once more a name that hurt only when it surfaced unexpectedly.
Then she looked toward the window. The raven’s broken wing sputtered green against the rain.
“Maybe,” she said.
Tom’s mouth tightened, but he nodded. “Maybe.”
He left a card on the bar. His name, a firm, an address near the river. Beneath it, in ink rather than print, a mobile number.
At the door he turned back.
“Rory.”
She waited.
“I’m glad you got out,” he said.
For a moment she could not answer. Then she pushed her sleeve up and rested her left wrist on the bar, the old crescent scar exposed between them like a small pale moon.
“So am I,” she said.
He stood there another second, rain-light and shadow cutting across his face. Then he opened the door and stepped into the night.
The green neon raven blinked above him. One wing burned. The other went dark.