Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2HFN0Q8F0BVJEP12XE9XH

The rain had followed her down the back stairs. Rory could smell it on her own jacket, mixed with the ginger and star anise of the last Golden Empress delivery, and she was halfway across the Raven's Nest, aiming for the empty stool by the taps, when she saw the man at the far end of the bar tap his glass twice with one fingernail. Tap, tap. A pause. Then he turned the glass a quarter turn. She knew that habit better than she knew most people's faces. She stopped walking. Under the green wash of the neon that leaked through the front window, he looked like a photograph of himself left too long in the sun. The Dafydd Pryce she remembered had been round-cheeked and untidy, with dark curls that made him look permanently just out of bed, and a laugh that used to turn heads across the whole of the Students' Union. This man was lean to the point of severity. His hair was cropped close. He wore a charcoal overcoat that had cost more than her rent, and a watch that caught the light whenever he lifted his drink. He looked up. She watched him do the arithmetic, watched the recognition land and something complicated cross his face before he tidied it away. "Rory," he said. Nobody in London called her that except the people she'd chosen. It sounded strange in his voice, like a song she'd stopped humming years ago. "Daf." "Christ." He stood, then seemed unsure what standing was for. His hand started out toward her and withdrew. "I didn't— I'd no idea. A colleague said this place was worth a look. Quiet, he said." "It is quiet." She glanced at the maps on the walls, the black-and-white faces of strangers in trench coats and cold harbours. "Usually." Behind the bar, Silas was polishing a glass that was already clean. He didn't look at her. He shifted his weight off his bad knee, and the silver ring on his right hand clicked once against the glass. It was the closest thing to a question he would ask. She gave him the smallest shake of her head. *Fine. Leave it.* Rory took the stool one down from Dafydd's. Not next to him. He noticed. She saw him notice. "What are you drinking?" he asked. "I live upstairs. I don't need you to buy me a drink." "Upstairs." He almost smiled. "Right. Of course you do." "What's that supposed to mean?" "Nothing. Only that it sounds like you." He turned the glass again. "Somewhere you can hear everything and nobody expects you to say anything." She hadn't expected that, and it stung in a place she'd thought was scar tissue by now. Silas set down a tumbler of Bushmills in front of her without being asked, and she wrapped her hand around it. The little crescent on her wrist, pale against her skin, showed under the cuff of her jacket. Dafydd's eyes went to it and then away, fast, as though he'd touched a hot pan. "You look well," he said. "You look expensive." That got the laugh, or the ghost of it, a single breath through his nose. It was all that was left of the old one. "Goldberg and Finch. Corporate. Mergers, mostly." He said it flatly, the way you read out a sentence you've been handed. "I did the training contract, and then they kept me." "You hated all of that. You said the law was just men in costumes agreeing on which lies to bill for." "Did I say that?" "In the Y Fuwch. You had chips on your sleeve." "God." He rubbed his jaw. "I was twenty. I said a lot of things." He looked at her properly then, and his eyes were the same, heavy-lidded and brown and too honest for the coat. "You were the one who was going to do it right. You were going to be your dad. Cross-examine somebody into tears on principle." "I never wanted to be my dad." "No," he said. "I know that now." Rain ticked on the window. Somewhere at the back of the bar a chair scraped, and one of Silas's regulars laughed at something low and private. Rory drank and let the whiskey burn a line down her chest. She was aware, distantly, of how still she was keeping her shoulders. She had learned that from Evan too, the art of making herself a small, unreadable thing in a room. "I heard you left," Dafydd said. "Cardiff. Second year, wasn't it? Someone said you'd gone to London and nobody knew where." "Eva knew." "Eva always did." A pause. "I thought about writing. I had your mum's address from that Christmas thing. I'd sit down and I'd get as far as *Dear Rory*." "And then?" "And then I'd think, what do I say?" He looked at his hands. They were clean, manicured, and absolutely still. "That I'm glad you got out? That sounds like I'm taking credit. That I'm sorry? For what, exactly? Nobody ever asks the question properly, so nobody has to answer it." There it was. She'd wondered whether they would walk all the way round it, the two of them, like people circling a hole in a floor. She remembered the night without wanting to. The Union's sticky carpet, the bass thudding through her sternum, and Evan's fingers closing around her arm above the elbow, not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to say *now*. She remembered looking over Evan's shoulder as he steered her toward the doors, and seeing Dafydd by the pool table with a pint halfway to his mouth. Seeing him see her. Seeing him lower his eyes to the froth and take a drink. He had been her best friend for two years. He'd held her hair back in a toilet at a house party in Cathays. He'd read her personal statement aloud in a dreadful posh voice until she cried laughing. "You saw," she said. It wasn't a question. "Yes." "More than once." "Yes." His voice cracked on it and he cleared it. "I told myself it wasn't my business. That you'd tell me if you wanted help. That he was my mate too, and I couldn't be sure, and I'd look a fool." He shook his head slowly. "I've made a career out of being reasonable, Rory. It started there. It started with me being reasonable in a pub." She should have felt vindicated. She had rehearsed this exact conversation in a hundred bad nights, in a hundred ways, some of them cruel. Now that it was here, she felt only tired, the deep tiredness of setting down something she'd carried so long she'd forgotten it had weight. "I wouldn't have told you," she said. "If you'd asked." "I know." "So it wouldn't have mattered." "That's kind." He met her eyes. "It isn't true, though. You'd have known someone was looking." Silas had drifted to the far end of the bar, giving them the room without seeming to. Above his head, a faded photograph showed a snowy square and a man in a dark coat who might have been anyone. Rory stared at it and let the silence stretch. Her throat was doing something unpleasant. "You were funny," she said at last. "That's what I keep noticing. You used to be the funniest person I knew." "I'm still funny. Ask the partners." "Daf." "I know." He finished his drink and set the glass down with great care. "I got very good at being careful. I don't know when the rest of it went. One year I looked up and it was just, quiet. Efficient. Nobody's ever complained." She wanted to tell him that she'd changed too, that the girl who had let herself be steered out of a room was gone and someone harder and warier had taken her place, someone who carried noodles through Soho in the rain and slept with her boots by the door. But that wasn't the same kind of change, and they both knew it. She'd been remade by a fire. He'd been sanded down by nothing at all. He reached into his coat and drew out a card, cream stock, the letters raised. He laid it on the bar between them and didn't push it toward her. "If you ever want to hate me in person," he said. "Or not. Whichever." Rory looked at the card without touching it. Then she looked at the tired, careful man in the good coat, and for one second saw the boy in the football shirt behind his eyes, still holding the pint, still deciding. "Goodnight, Daf," she said. He nodded as though that were an answer. He buttoned the coat, put a note on the bar for Silas, and walked out under the green sign into the rain, and the door swung shut behind him. She stayed where she was. After a while Silas came and topped up her glass, and neither of them said anything at all. The card sat on the polished wood, slowly gathering the light.