Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2FVTB440CA404FH2WF8WG

The delivery bag still hung from Rory's shoulder when she pushed through the door of the Raven's Nest, carrying the smell of ginger and fried shallots in with her. Rain had turned Greek Street to black glass. Behind her the green neon sign hummed, throwing a sickly wash across the wet pavement, and ahead of her the bar sat dim and amber, the old maps on the walls gone soft at the edges in the low light. She had meant to go straight up the back stairs to her flat. Instead she stopped, because a man at the far end of the bar had turned his head, and she knew the line of his jaw before her mind caught up. "Aurora?" Nobody called her that here. Silas said Rory, or Carter when he was being dry. The regulars said *love*. She heard the full name in a Cardiff vowel and felt the floor tilt half an inch. "Dylan," she said. Dylan Pryce had been all elbows and cowlicks at nineteen, a boy who wore the same rugby shirt three days running and argued contract law over chips at two in the morning. The man on the stool wore a charcoal suit that fit him like a decision. His hair was cut close and threaded with early grey. He'd lost the softness under his eyes, and something else had gone with it, a looseness in the mouth that used to arrive a half-second before his laugh. "Christ," he said. "It *is* you. I thought I was imagining it." He stood and did not seem to know what to do with his hands. In the end he offered one, and she took it, and they both looked faintly embarrassed by the handshake. "You look well." "I look wet." She set the helmet on the bar. "What are you doing in Soho?" "Conference. Well. A dinner after a conference. Someone's idea of networking." He gestured at his glass, whisky, no ice. "I wandered in here because of the sign. It looked like the only honest place on the street." "Don't say that to Silas. It'll go to his head." From the other end of the bar, Silas glanced up from the glass he was polishing. He took in Rory, then the stranger, then Rory again, all in a single unhurried pass, and turned back to his cloth. She knew that look. He'd file it and ask about it later, or he wouldn't ask at all and would simply know. She slid onto the stool beside Dylan's. Up close he smelled of good soap and something expensive underneath, and she found she was tugging her jacket sleeve down over her left wrist, over the small pale crescent there. An old habit. She hadn't done it in months. "Last I heard," Dylan said, "you'd gone to London. Nobody knew where. Your mum said you were *finding your feet*." He said it gently, with the Welsh lilt around it, and it landed harder than he could have meant. "I asked around. For a while." "Did you?" "For a while," he said again, and looked into his whisky. Silas came down the bar without being asked and set a glass of red in front of her. He didn't say anything. The limp was more pronounced tonight, the damp getting into the knee, and the silver ring on his right hand clicked once against the wood as he moved off. Rory was grateful for him the way she was grateful for a wall at her back. "So you finished," she said. "The degree. You're a barrister?" "Solicitor first. Now I'm at chambers in Cardiff." A short, dry exhale. "Your dad trained me, more or less. Did you know that? Brendan. He took me on for a pupillage year and never once mentioned you. I think it cost him something." Rory turned the stem of her glass a quarter turn on the bar. "He wouldn't have." "He's proud of you, you know. He just doesn't have anywhere to put it." "Dylan." She said it quietly. "Don't." He nodded, quickly, as if he'd been expecting the blow and was relieved it was no worse. For a moment they listened to the bar: the low rumble of a couple in the corner, ice shifting in a shaker, rain ticking against the window. On the wall behind him hung a black-and-white photograph of a Prague street, a tram frozen mid-turn. She'd stared at it a hundred times. It struck her now that it hung exactly where a man could see it from the till. "You used to be so loud," she said, before she could stop herself. "You used to argue with lecturers for fun. You got thrown out of Tort once." "I was right about the duty of care." "You were insufferable." "I was." He smiled, and for a second the boy surfaced, the mouth loosening the way it used to. Then it closed over again, and she watched it happen, watched him fold the whole man away like a napkin. "It's funny. I spent years getting rid of that. Every partner I ever worked for told me it was a liability. So I learned to wait. To let people finish. To say nothing until saying something was worth it." He turned the glass. "I got very good at it." "It shows." "Does it? Good. Terrible, but good." She laughed, and it came out smaller than she intended. He was quiet a moment. Then, still looking at the glass: "I saw you. That spring. The week before you left." Rory went very still. "On the steps outside the library. You had your sleeve pulled down, like that." His eyes flicked to her wrist, then away. "And Evan was on the phone, and he was smiling, and you weren't. I was thirty feet away. I remember deciding it was none of my business." His voice didn't waver, which was somehow worse. "I've had ten years to think of a better word than *decided*. I haven't found one." The wine had gone warm in her hand. She set it down. There were a dozen things she could say, and she could feel each of them, smooth and ready: *It wasn't your fault. You were twenty. Nobody knew.* All of them were true, and all of them would have been a kindness, and she found she didn't have one to spare, not for him, not yet. "I wouldn't have told you," she said instead. "If you'd asked." "I know." "That's not the same as forgiveness." "I know that too." He finally looked at her. His eyes were the same, that startling brown, the one thing time hadn't touched. "I didn't come in here to be forgiven. I didn't even know you were here. I only wanted you to know I'd noticed. That's all. That someone had." The neon buzzed in the window, painting the edge of his face green and then, as a car passed, wiping it clean. Rory thought of the girl on those library steps, all nerve and sleeve, so certain that leaving was the same as being unmarked. She thought of the man beside her, who had learned to wait, and of what it cost to wait for ten years for the right moment to say a true thing to the wrong decade. "You'd have been a terrible bodyguard," she said at last. "You couldn't even keep your shirt clean." He made a sound that was half laugh, half something that didn't have a name. He pressed the heel of his hand to one eye, briefly, then dropped it. "No," he said. "I really couldn't." Down the bar, Silas set a glass on the shelf with more care than it needed. Dylan finished his whisky and stood, and reached into his jacket for a card. He hesitated over it, then laid it on the bar between them instead of pressing it into her hand, leaving the choice where it belonged. "If you ever want a bad conversation about contract law," he said. "I'll bring chips." He nodded. At the door he paused with his hand on the frame, the green light catching his grey hair, and for an instant he looked exactly like both of the men he had been. Then the rain took him. Rory picked up the card. She didn't read it. She turned it over in her fingers, once, twice, and slid it into the pocket of her jacket, beside the crescent of her wrist. "Friend of yours?" Silas asked, from very close by. "He was," she said. She lifted the wine and found she could finally drink it. "He might be again. I haven't decided." Silas said nothing, only refilled her glass, and let the rain go on.