Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2GAHA8Q7AWZZQG01BH7R0

The green neon buzzed over the door of the Raven's Nest, and under it Rory shook rain from her delivery jacket. The jacket still stank of black bean sauce and star anise. She had eleven minutes before her legs gave out and one plan: the stool at the end of the bar, where Silas kept the good whisky and the bad jokes. Silas didn't look up from the glass he polished. The signet ring clicked against the rim. "You're dripping on my maps." "They've survived worse." "They've survived Prague. Don't test them." He tipped his chin toward the far corner. "Someone's been asking about you. Well, not by name. She asked if the girl with the black hair and the takeaway bag ever came in." Rory's hand stopped halfway to the stool. "She?" "Sat there an hour. Sparkling water, two limes. Tipped like a woman who's never waited a table." Rory turned. The woman in the corner booth wore a charcoal suit cut to the shoulder, and her hair was scraped into a knot so tight it lifted her eyebrows. A phone lay face down at her elbow. She held herself straight, hands folded, like a person waiting for a verdict. Rory knew the hands. She had held them over a school wall in Cardiff, aged nine, both of them screaming with laughter. "Cerys?" The woman stood too fast. Her knee caught the table and the water shivered in its glass. "Rory. God. I wasn't sure you'd come down. I mean, I didn't know you would. I didn't know you lived—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "Hello." "Hello yourself." They stood a body's width apart. Neither reached out. "You look," Cerys began. "Like I've been dragged through a wok." "I was going to say well." "Liar." Rory slid into the opposite side of the booth and dropped the delivery bag between her feet. "You've gone and got tall." "Heels." "No, it's the posture. You used to walk like someone was chasing you." Rory studied the knot of hair, the pearl studs, the pale line where a nose ring had once sat. "Where's the pink?" Cerys touched her head as if she'd forgotten it was there. "Gone. Years ago. They don't love pink in Lincoln's Inn." "Lincoln's Inn." Rory let out a low whistle. "Barrister?" "Pupillage, then tenancy. Fourth year now." She turned the glass a quarter turn on its coaster. "Commercial disputes. It's exactly as thrilling as it sounds." "Your mam must be made up." "She has a photo of me in the wig on the mantelpiece. Visitors get the tour." A smile came, brief and thin, and it went out again. "And you? Your dad still asks after you, you know. When I go home. He asks if I've heard anything." The words landed like a dropped plate. Rory kept her face still. Behind the bar, the polishing stopped, then started again. "Does he." "Every time. I say you're grand. I say you're busy." Cerys's thumbnail worried the edge of the coaster. "I didn't know what else to say. Nobody told me where you went." "That was rather the point." "I know." "Eva knew." "Eva told me nothing. I asked. I asked her twice." Cerys glanced up, and something raw showed under the polish, a girl in a torn band T-shirt begging to be let in. "I wrote you letters. Real ones, paper. I never posted them. Isn't that stupid? I kept them in a shoebox." "Where's the shoebox now?" "Under my bed in Islington. Next to the shoes that go with this." She flicked a hand at her suit. Rory laughed, a short bark that surprised them both. Silas appeared at the table with a tumbler of amber whisky for her and nothing for Cerys, set down without a word. His limp dragged a half-beat behind his step. He looked at Cerys for exactly as long as it took to memorise her, and left. "Friend of yours?" Cerys asked. "Landlord. Sort of." Rory wrapped both hands around the glass. "So what is it, Cez? You didn't put on the armour and sit in a Soho dive for an hour to tell me about tenancy." Cerys said nothing. Her eyes dropped to Rory's left wrist, where the sleeve had ridden up and the small pale crescent showed. "Still there," she said. "Scars tend to be." "I remember the blood on the wall. You wouldn't cry. You just kept saying, 'It's fine, it's fine, don't tell Mam.'" Cerys's voice cracked on the last word and she cleared it away. "You said that again. The last time I saw you. At Evan's flat. Do you remember?" The whisky sat cold and heavy in Rory's mouth. The neon buzzed. Somewhere behind the bookshelf that hid the back room, a floorboard creaked. "I remember." "You had a scarf on. In July." Cerys spoke to the coaster now, each word placed with care, like evidence. "I stood in his hallway and I looked at that scarf and I thought, I'll ring her tomorrow. I'll ask her properly tomorrow. And then I had a moot in the morning, and an essay after, and then you'd gone." "Cerys." "I built a whole career on asking the right questions, Rory. Cross-examination, they call it. I'm good at it. Ask anyone." A wet breath. "And I couldn't ask one." Rory turned the tumbler in a slow circle. The ice had long since gone. "You were twenty. You were also three vodkas deep and wearing a traffic cone on your head." "That was the Freshers' party." "It was still you." "It was." Cerys pressed the heel of her hand under one eye and checked her fingers for smudged mascara, found none, and looked almost disappointed. "She's gone, though. Isn't she? The girl in the cone. I couldn't find her if I tried. I put her in a box with the letters." "I'd not have known you if you hadn't waved." "I didn't wave." "You did. Just now, with your whole spine." That drew a real laugh, wet and startled. Cerys covered her mouth. When she lowered her hand, her accent had crept back, the vowels of home rounding the edges. "Christ. Listen to me. Nine years of elocution coaching and it takes you thirty seconds." "Say 'butty.'" "Rory." "Say it." "Butty," Cerys said, and the word broke in the middle. Rory reached across the table. Her fingers, still smelling of ginger and soy, closed over the cold hands folded on the wood. Cerys let them stay. "I'm not angry," Rory said. "I was. For a year, maybe more. Not at you." "You should be." "I don't have the room. I run on takeaway shifts and about four hours' sleep." She squeezed once. "Buy me a chip butty on Saturday and we'll call it square." "Chips don't come cheap in Lincoln's Inn." "Then it's a good thing we're not in Lincoln's Inn." Cerys looked down at their joined hands, at the pale crescent on Rory's wrist, at the phone that had begun to buzz against the table, its screen lighting a name she did not read. She turned it over. The buzzing went on beneath her palm, small and insistent, and neither of them looked away from the other.