Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD86D615KFX4YG6AFDQK3MB

The green neon of The Raven's Nest buzzed overhead as Aurora pushed through the door, rain still jewelling her black hair, the delivery bag slung across one shoulder. Friday night. The usual crowd had claimed the usual corners, and Silas stood behind the bar polishing a glass with the patience of a man who had once waited six hours in a Prague stairwell for a source who never showed. "Late run," she said, dropping the bag behind the counter. "Yu-Fei sends her regards and half a box of spring rolls." "Half?" "I have a metabolism to maintain." Silas' mouth twitched beneath the grey-streaked beard. He set a whisky in front of her without being asked, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the low light. Aurora had just wrapped her fingers around the glass when a voice rose from somewhere behind her, sharp with disbelief. "Rory? Rory Carter?" She turned. The woman standing beside the fruit machine had one hand clamped over her mouth and the other still holding an umbrella that dripped steadily onto the floorboards. Dark blonde hair, longer than Aurora remembered. A camel coat that cost more than Aurora's rent. For a moment the years folded in on themselves, and Aurora saw her instead in a school blazer, sharing a cigarette behind the science block, swearing on everything holy she'd never leave Cardiff. "Nia." "Oh my God." Nia crossed the floor in three strides and pulled her into a hug that smelled of expensive perfume and rain. "Oh my God, it's actually you. I'm here for a conference, the hotel's two streets over, I just wanted a glass of wine somewhere that didn't have a lobby attached—" She pulled back, gripping Aurora's shoulders, her eyes flicking over her face like she was checking for damage. "Seven years, Rory. Seven years and not a single word." The whisky sat warm in Aurora's stomach. "I know." "You know?" Nia laughed, but it had a jagged edge on it. She slid onto the stool beside Aurora's and signalled vaguely at Silas. "Whatever she's having, please. Make it a double." She turned back. "I knocked on your mum's door about four years ago. Jennifer said you were in London and doing fine. That's it. That's all she'd give me. 'Doing fine.' I thought—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "I thought a lot of things." Silas set the glass down in front of Nia and retreated to the far end of the bar without a word, the way he always did when a conversation had weight to it. "You look different," Nia said. "It's been seven years." "No, I mean—" Nia tilted her head. "It's not the hair. You cut the hair. It's not that either." Her gaze dropped to Aurora's hands, wrapped around the glass, to the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist she'd never been able to hide. "You look like you. That's the strange part. More like you than you ever looked back home. Back home you always looked like you were waiting for permission to be in the room." Aurora turned the glass a quarter circle on the wood. "That's a lot to read off one glance." "We shared a bedroom every summer from age nine to sixteen. I can read you like a bus timetable." Nia took a long drink. "Evan told everyone you'd gone to stay with family in Ireland. For your health. That was the official line." "Of course it was." "I believed it. That's the thing I've been carrying around, Rory. I believed it. I told people myself. 'She's in Ireland, she's fine, she'll be back.'" Nia set the glass down harder than she needed to. "And then six months later I'm at Sian's wedding and he's there with someone new, and he tells me, quite casually, that you're unstable, that you've always been unstable, and I remember standing there thinking—" She broke off. Swallowed. "Thinking that I'd never once asked you what unstable meant. Not when you stopped answering texts. Not when you cancelled the trip to Tenby. Not once." The bar hummed around them. Someone dropped coins into the fruit machine. Silas moved a crate of glasses from one shelf to another, slow and deliberate, giving them the illusion of privacy. "You couldn't have known," Aurora said. "I could have asked. That's different from knowing. Asking costs nothing." Nia's fingers worried the stem of her glass. "You know what I did the week after you left? I helped his mother paint her front room. Two full days. She made us sandwiches. And the whole time he kept going on about how worried he was about you, and I kept nodding along like a bloody seagull." "Nia." "Let me say it. I've had seven years to rehearse this and I might never get another chance." She took a breath. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't the person you could call. You called Eva. You didn't call me. And I've spent a long time being angry about that before I figured out that the person to be angry at wasn't you." Aurora stared into her whisky. The ice had gone, melted to nothing. "I didn't call anyone. Eva guessed. She turned up outside the library in third year and took one look at me and said, 'Right, you're coming to London when we graduate, that's decided.' She decided it. I just didn't argue hard enough." "And the night you left?" "There wasn't a night. There was a morning. He'd gone to work. I packed one bag in twenty minutes and got the train." Aurora's thumb found the scar on her wrist, an old reflex. "Do you know what I remember most? I left the kettle on the hob. For months afterwards I'd wake up thinking about that kettle. Not about him. The kettle." Nia was quiet for a moment. Then, softer: "Are you okay now? Really?" "I deliver noodles for a restaurant in Chinatown and live above a bar." Aurora glanced towards Silas, who raised one eyebrow without looking up from his glass. "I'm okay. Really." "Good." Nia exhaled, some of the fight going out of her shoulders. She straightened the napkin under her glass, folded it once, twice. "I'm getting married in May." "There it is." "What?" "The real reason you needed a double." Aurora nudged her. "Who is he?" "She. Cerys. She's a dentist, which my mother has decided is the same as being a doctor and tells absolutely everyone." Nia smiled, and for a second she was seventeen again, all knees and gossip and grand plans. "You'd like her. She's the only person I've ever met who argues with me properly. Doesn't let things slide. I think—" She hesitated. "I think losing you taught me what it costs when people let things slide." "You didn't lose me. I'm literally sitting here." "You know what I mean." Nia finished her drink and turned the empty glass upside down on the napkin. "The invite's going out in January. I'm not going to pretend I don't know where you live anymore, and you're not going to pretend you didn't get it." "Blackmail. Lovely." "Cardiff, May, there'll be a harpist and my aunt will cry into the vol-au-vents. It'll be horrendous. I need at least one person there who knew me before I became interesting." Aurora laughed, and it surprised her, how easy it came out. Somewhere down the bar, Silas began drying glasses again, the limp in his left leg audible in the slow shift of his weight against the floorboards. "May," Aurora said. "I'll check the delivery rota." "Rory." "I'll be there." Nia searched her face one more time, that old bus-timetable scrutiny, and whatever she found seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded and reached for her coat. Outside, the rain had thinned to a mist that turned the streetlights to smudges of gold. She hugged Aurora again at the door, fierce and brief, the way you hold something you once let fall. "Seven years is too long," Nia said into her shoulder. "It is," Aurora said. "Don't let it be again." Nia stepped out under the green neon, raised the umbrella, and was gone into the wet glitter of Soho. Aurora stood there a moment longer, then came back to her stool and found Silas had already refilled her glass. "Old ghost?" he asked. "Old friend," Aurora said. "There's a difference." "That there is." He hung the tea towel over his shoulder and gave her the smallest of nods, the one he reserved for people who'd said the true thing instead of the easy one. "That there is."