Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD7WJ9XR72QFPMDDYN2P6BB

The green neon buzzed against the wet pavement as Aurora pushed through the door of the Raven's Nest, shoulders damp from the October drizzle. She had finished her last delivery an hour ago, but the flat upstairs felt too quiet, and quiet had a way of turning into Evan's voice if she let it. So she came down to the bar, where Silas kept the noise at a low, human hum. She was halfway to her usual stool when a woman at the corner table stood up. "Rory? Rory Carter?" The voice hit some deep drawer in her memory and yanked it open. Aurora turned. The woman was tall, willowy, copper hair cut into a sharp bob that must have cost eighty quid, wearing a camel coat over a silk blouse. It took a full three seconds for the face to resolve into something recognisable. "Megan? Megan Price?" "Oh my God." Megan crossed the floor in four strides and gripped Aurora's forearms, scanning her face the way people examine banknotes. "It is you. What are you—I mean, London, obviously, but—God, how long has it been?" "Seven years?" Aurora's mouth had gone dry. "Since graduation. You went to that consultancy thing in Manchester." "Deloitte. Then Singapore, then back here." Megan's perfume smelled like money and airports. "Sit with me. Please. I'm waiting for my husband, he's always late, sit." Silas caught Aurora's eye from behind the bar and raised one brow, the question plain: everything all right? She gave him a small nod and let herself be pulled into the corner booth. Megan ordered two glasses of the Rioja without asking. "You still drink red, right? You used to nick your dad's Rioja and we'd drink it in the park behind the cathedral." "That was white, actually. From a bag." "It was not—" Megan laughed, and for a moment she was nineteen again, sprawled on the grass with her shoes off. Then the laugh settled and the forty-something polish came back down over her like a shutter. "Look at you. You look… different." "Older." "No. Not older. Harder?" Megan tilted her head. "That sounds awful. I mean—you used to be the soft one. You cried at that documentary about the bees." "I still cry at the bee documentary." "Do you?" The wine arrived. Silas set the glasses down himself, unhurried, his limp barely noticeable tonight. "Anything else, ladies?" "We're fine, thank you," Megan said, already turning back to Aurora, dismissing him the way she'd dismiss furniture. Aurora watched Silas walk away and felt something small and hot rise in her chest. "He's my landlord," she said. "And my friend." "Oh. God, sorry, I didn't—" Megan waved it off. "So. Landlord. You live around here? What are you doing? Please tell me you finally ditched the law thing and went into journalism like you wanted." Aurora turned her glass by the stem. The crescent scar on her wrist caught the candlelight. "I deliver food. For a restaurant in Chinatown." Silence. Megan's face performed several manoeuvres. "Part-time? While you—" "Just the deliveries." "Right." Megan took a long drink. "Right. Well. London's expensive, everyone does what they—" She stopped, visibly rearranging her own sentence. "Sorry. I'm being a cow. It's just—you were top of our year. You were going to be QC by thirty. We all said it. Your dad said it." "My dad says a lot of things." There it was. The first stone dropped into the well, and they both heard the depth of it. Megan set her glass down carefully. "Is he all right? Brendan?" "He's fine. He's Brendan." Aurora watched the candle flame lean and straighten. "We don't talk much. Since I left Cardiff." "Because of the law thing?" "Because of a lot of things." The words came out flat, rehearsed by years of not being said. "There was a man. After uni. Evan." Megan went very still. "The tall one. You brought him to Sian's birthday that time. He didn't let you finish a sentence all night and I thought—" She stopped. "You thought what?" "Nothing. I thought nothing, that's the problem." Megan's manicured fingers found the base of her glass and worried at it. "I said something to Rhiannon afterwards. That he seemed off. And then I got on a plane to Manchester and I never said it to you." "You weren't the only one who saw it." "But I was the only one who—" Megan's voice cracked, just slightly, and the consultancy polish cracked with it. "Rory, I heard things. Years later. Through Rhiannon's cousin. About what he did. And I sat in my office in Singapore with my seventy-hour weeks and my view of the harbour, and I thought, I should call her. I should have called her seven years ago. And I didn't even have your number anymore. I'd let it lapse. Like a magazine subscription." Aurora looked at her. Really looked. The sharp bob, the good coat, the wedding band with a diamond the size of a pea. And underneath it all, the girl who'd once driven forty minutes at two in the morning because Aurora had a panic attack before her contract law exam, who'd sat on the floor of the student union toilets holding her hair back, who'd promised—we'll be old ladies together, we'll have adjacent bungalows and fight about the hedge. "I ran," Aurora said. "I didn't tell anyone where I was going except Eva. You couldn't have called." "I could have tried." "And said what?" "Anything. 'I saw it too. You're not mad. Get out.' Anything." Megan's eyes had gone bright, and she looked away, out at the rain-streaked window, at the green neon bleeding across the glass. "You know what I do now? I restructure companies. I fly in, I tell four hundred people their jobs are redundant, I fly out. And I'm brilliant at it. Everyone says so. And some nights I lie in bed and think about the year I didn't phone my best friend, and I can't remember a single one of those companies' names." The bar noise moved around them—glasses, low laughter, Silas saying something dry to a regular. Aurora reached across the table and, after a moment's hesitation, put her hand over Megan's. The diamond was cold. "I got out," she said. "Eva got me out. I live above a bar with maps on the walls and a landlord who taught me how to throw a punch and spot a tail, which is a long story. I deliver dumplings and I'm—" She searched for the honest word. "I'm rebuilding. Some days it feels like a life. Some days it feels like the wreckage of one. But it's mine." "Delivering dumplings." Megan laughed wetly, and squeezed her hand. "The pride of Cardiff University." "The pride of Cardiff University." They sat like that while the rain worked at the windows. Then Megan straightened, wiped under her eyes with the heel of her hand, and pulled out her phone. "Give me your number. Not so I can feel better about myself—well, partly that—but because I'm not doing it again. Losing it. Whatever time does to people, whatever it did to you, whatever it did to me." She looked up, and there was the nineteen-year-old again, fierce and tearful on the union toilets floor. "Adjacent bungalows. I haven't forgotten." "You'll fight me about the hedge." "I will absolutely fight you about the hedge." Aurora recited her number, and Megan typed it in with shaking thumbs, and the candle burned down a quarter inch, and neither of them said the thing that lay beneath everything else—that the years were gone, and no phone call, however overdue, would bring them back, and that this was precisely why the next ones had to be made.