Run: 2026-09-10-01M25DVK968RMCWFCGR7HVVXJH

Rain had followed Aurora Carter down Dean Street and shook itself loose from her jacket when she shouldered through the door of the Raven's Nest. She carried the paper bag from the Golden Empress under one arm, elbow clamped to her ribs, the way she'd once carried a mooting trophy through the corridors at Cardiff. Silas stood behind the bar with a rag over one shoulder. The radio murmured beside the till like a man talking in his sleep. "You're late." "Yu-Fei added a second bag." Rory set it on the counter. "She thinks you're wasting away." "She's right. Sit. Dry off." Rory turned towards the wall of maps — Lisbon, Trieste, a coastline she'd never learned the name of — and stopped. The woman at the far end of the bar had her phone face down and both elbows on the wood. Navy suit, cream blouse, a jeweller's shine to her hair. Cut exactly as long as it had been in first year, when both of them had found the same hairdresser, the same two-for-one gin, the same hangover. Rory's fingers went to the paper bag and pressed the fold flat. She knew the run out of there. Door, left, the alley behind the noodle place, the bike. "Rory?" Nia had already turned. Recognition arrived slow and mechanical, like a lift reaching the right floor. "Rory Carter." Nia's glass came down hard enough to leave a wet ring. "Someone told me you were dead." "Someone told me you married a Davies." "Someone was half right." Nia slid off the stool and stopped, unsure of the distance, then crossed it anyway. They hugged. Rory stood inside it with her hands at her sides for a heartbeat before she remembered to put them somewhere, and by then Nia had stepped back. "Five years," Nia said. "About that." "You look—" Nia's eyes went down Rory's jacket, the waterproof trousers, the helmet hooked on her belt. "You cut your hair." "It grew back first." "Ha." Nia sat again, and Rory took the stool beside her, and Silas poured a pint without being asked and set it down with his signet ring tapping the glass. "He knows your order," Nia said. "He knows everyone's order." "That's either very good service or very bad manners." Silas limped back down the bar and picked up his rag. "Both," he said, and the radio swallowed the rest. Nia drank. Rory watched her do it — the precise, unhurried tilt of the wrist, the way she checked the room once over the rim of the glass and filed everything she saw. "You're in London," Rory said. "Disclosure hearing. Rolls Building. Four days of barristers reading each other's emails aloud." Nia set the glass down. "The firm put me in a hotel in Shoreditch with a window over a building site. I walked forty minutes to find somewhere that wasn't a wine bar with a queue." "Lucky you found this one." "I found it because a man on the corner told me to keep walking." Nia glanced at the maps, the black-and-white photographs, the bookshelf behind the bar with its strange, wrong hinge. "It's a strange place. What is it?" "It's a bar." "That bookshelf doesn't close properly." "Then don't close it." Nia laughed, and just as quickly stopped. "God. You always did that. Answer a different question than the one anybody asked." "Do I?" "So what is it you do now? You never said. Nobody's said. I asked your mother at Christmas two years running and she handed me a mince pie and asked about my mother." Rory turned the pint a quarter-turn on the coaster. Rain ticked against the window behind her. "I deliver food," she said. "Deliver." "On a bike. Mostly noodles. Occasionally a birthday cake, which is nerve-racking." Nia's mouth opened and closed. She picked up her gin, put it down. "You got a two-one from Cardiff. You had a training contract interview with—" "I remember." "You took Ogilvie apart in the moot in front of the entire hall. Do you remember that? You stood up, you did the whole thing without notes, and he went red from the collar up. And afterwards you told me you were getting out of Cardiff before you were thirty." "I got out at twenty-two." "Lucky you." Nia said it flat, no edge on it anywhere, which was somehow worse. Rory drank. Behind her, a group came in shaking umbrellas, and Silas moved along the bar to meet them. "Your dad still rings mine," Rory said. "Apparently." "He does. Every March. He asks if we've heard anything." Nia traced the wet ring on the wood with one finger. "I told him once I'd seen you on the tube. I hadn't. I made it up so he'd stop looking at me like that." Rory said nothing. "Do you want to know what I did that night?" Nia's finger stopped. "You'd gone. The flat was half empty. The kettle was still warm, which I've thought about a