Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2C8K3NWJG5682AMX8FFD4

The green neon buzzed over the door of the Raven's Nest, and rain turned its glow into a smear on the pavement. Rory shouldered through with a Golden Empress bag in each hand. Steam fogged the plastic. Tuesday nights meant kung pao for Silas and egg fried rice for whoever he had cornered in the back. She got three steps in before a stool scraped behind her. "Aurora Carter." Nobody had used the whole name in two years. Rory set the bags on the bar and turned, thumb finding the crescent scar on her left wrist, a habit she had never managed to break. A woman in a camel coat stood beside the stool, hair cropped close, a rain-spotted umbrella in her fist. It took Rory a beat. Then the gap in the front teeth, the way she planted her feet like she expected a shove. "Meg?" "Christ. It is you." Meg laughed, and it cracked halfway. "I thought I'd gone mad. Some girl in a bike helmet, walking in like she owns the place." "I don't own it." "You look like you do." Meg's eyes travelled down to the helmet under Rory's arm, then to the logo on the bag. "You deliver food." "Part-time." "You. You who got a First in Contract Law without opening the textbook." "I opened it." Rory pulled a stool out with her boot but didn't sit. "Twice." Meg laughed again, softer this time. Behind the bar, Silas polished a glass that did not need it and kept his gaze on the middle distance. He had the talent of being a piece of furniture when it suited him. He nudged two tumblers across the wood without a word. Whisky, neat. Rory hadn't asked for it. "On the house," he said, and limped to the far end. Meg watched him go. "Friend of yours?" "Landlord. Sort of." "You live here?" "Upstairs." "Above a bar in Soho." Meg turned the tumbler a quarter turn on its coaster. "You used to alphabetise your highlighters." "I still have opinions about highlighters." "Do you?" Meg looked up and held her stare. "Because I'm sitting across from you and I'm not sure I'd know you in the street. Your hair's different. Your voice is different. You used to talk with your hands, Ror. You'd knock things over. Now you just stand there." Rory glanced at her own hands. They rested flat on the bar, still as a pair of paperweights. "People change." "Not like that. People get tired, or fat, or they find yoga. They don't..." Meg gestured at her, at the door behind her, at the mirror above the bottles where Rory had already clocked the entrance twice. "You checked the door when I said your name. And the back exit. I watched you do it." "Occupational hazard. I ride a bike in London." "Don't." The word came out flat. "Don't do the polite voice with me. I was at your eighteenth. I held your hair back over a toilet in Pontcanna." Rory picked up the whisky and drank half. It burned in a clean, useful way. "You look different too," she said. "I got sober." Meg lifted her tumbler, glanced at it, and put it down untouched. "Fourteen months. I order it so I've got something to hold. Sounds daft." "It doesn't." "I'm at Gray's Inn now. Pupillage. I wear the itchy wig and everything." A thin smile. "Your dad wrote my reference, you know. Brendan. He never said a word about you in the letter, and I never asked. I think we were both being tactful." Rory's jaw tightened. A muscle jumped near her ear. "How is he?" "You'd know better than me." "I haven't rung." "Rory." "I know." The jukebox in the corner shuffled to something with brass in it. Somebody laughed by the window. Meg pressed her lips together, pulled a breath through her nose, and looked at the maps on the wall instead of at Rory: Prague, Tangier, the Baltic coast, all yellowed, all pinned by the same rusted tacks. "I need to say something," she said. "I've had it ready for two years, and I've practised it in the shower, so let me get through it." "You don't have to." "I introduced you to him." Rory said nothing. "Freshers' ball. I dragged you across the room by your sleeve. 'Ror, this is Evan, he's doing Law, he's lovely.' I actually said lovely." Meg's knuckles whitened around the glass. "And then the following spring you stopped coming to lectures. You wore long sleeves in June. You cancelled on my birthday because you had a migraine. Three migraines that year. I counted afterwards. I counted, Rory, but I didn't count at the time." "Meg." "I saw the bruise on your arm at Christmas. You said you walked into a door, and I said, 'Clumsy cow,' and I laughed." Her voice thinned. "I laughed." Rory turned the tumbler in a slow circle. Under the lip of the bar her left hand curled around her wrist and squeezed. "I wanted you to laugh," she said. "That was the whole point of the door. If you'd stopped laughing, I would've had to stop pretending." "That's not a gift I should've accepted." "You were twenty-two." "So were you." Meg's eyes shone. She blinked hard and the shine held. "Eva found out. Eva, from primary school, who'd moved away, who you barely spoke to. She rang you from Hackney, and you got on a train. And I found out from a group chat, Ror. A group chat. That you'd gone." "I couldn't tell anyone." "I know that. I know. I've had the counselling." A wet, ugly laugh. "Doesn't stop me wanting to have been the one you told." The silence stretched. Rory looked at the woman beside her, at the ridiculous coat, the gap in the teeth, the hands that had once held her hair out of a toilet bowl and had never once been raised to her in anger. Something behind her ribs shifted, like furniture dragged across a floor in the flat below. "You want to know why I don't talk with my hands anymore?" she said. Meg waited. "Because he used to watch them. Where they went, how fast. If I gestured too wide, it meant I was getting loud. If I fidgeted, it meant I was lying." Rory flattened her palms against the wood again. "It took me a year here to stop counting every movement before I made it. I'm still learning to knock things over." "Oh, love." "Don't." "Sorry." "Don't be sorry either." Rory exhaled, and the breath shook only once. "You wanted a reason I turned into this. There it is. It's not a good one, and it doesn't fit on a card." Meg reached out and stopped an inch from Rory's wrist, her fingers hovering over the small pale crescent. "Is that from him?" "That's from a swing set in Roath Park. I was seven." A corner of Rory's mouth lifted. "You were there. You screamed louder than I did." "I did not." "You threw up on the slide." Meg barked out a laugh, and this time it held together. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and her shoulders shook, and Rory found her own face doing something unfamiliar, a loosening around the eyes, like a knot giving. "God, I've missed you," Meg said into her knuckles. Rory picked up the bags. The rice had gone lukewarm, and Silas would grumble about it. "Stay," she said. "I'll bring these through, and then I'll sit. Properly. You can order something that isn't whisky." "An orange juice." "Silas does a decent orange juice. He'll charge you a fiver for it." "Of course he will." Meg wiped her cheek with her thumb and slid onto the stool. "Ror?" "Yeah?" "Highlighters. Do you still alphabetise them?" "By shade," Rory said. "Not alphabetically. I'm not a monster."