Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2KEF9M3F6ZTYNDTZZ992E

The green neon over the door of the Raven's Nest turned every puddle on Greek Street the color of bottle glass. Rory shouldered through the door with the insulated bag still hanging off one arm, smelling of ginger and fried shallots, and let the warmth of the place close over her. Old maps blistered on the walls. Black-and-white strangers stared out of their frames, mid-laugh or mid-secret. Silas stood behind the bar working a cloth around the inside of a tumbler, his weight shifted off the bad knee, and he lifted his chin at her without a word. That meant *the usual*, and it meant *you're late*, and it meant *there's someone here you'll want to see.* He could fit a great deal into a chin. She followed it to the far end of the bar. The woman sitting there had her back half-turned, a charcoal coat folded over the neighboring stool as if it might be stolen. Dark hair cut to a blunt line at the jaw. A glass of something clear with a wedge of lime. She was reading the label on a bottle of tonic with the concentration of someone who wanted very much to be seen reading it. Then she looked up, and it was Meg. "Rory," Meg said. Not a question. She stood too quickly and caught the glass with her elbow, and Rory watched her steady it and smooth her own face in the same motion. "God. It *is* you." "Meg Howells." Rory set the bag down on the floor. Her voice came out lighter than she intended, a voice for the phone. "What are you doing in Soho?" "Meeting a client. He's not here. He's not coming, I think." Meg gave a short laugh. "I picked the place off a list. Someone said it was discreet." "It is," Silas said mildly, to no one, and moved down the bar with his slow uneven stride, the silver signet on his right hand flashing once under the lamps. They stood a moment. Rory catalogued her, because it was what she did now, a habit she'd never chosen. The Meg she'd known had been all wrists and noise, a girl who dyed her fringe violet before finals and got a warning from the dean, who once climbed the fountain outside the Students' Union to recite Dylan Thomas at the tops of her lungs and had to be talked down by campus security in the middle of *Do not go gentle*. That Meg had wanted to be a public defender. She had said it constantly, in pubs and on night buses, as if saying it enough would wear a groove in the world. This woman wore a wedding band and small pearl studs. Her nails were clear-varnished and even. She sat like someone who had learned to take up exactly the room she'd been allotted. "You look well," Meg said. "You look like a partner." "Senior associate." A pause. "Commercial litigation. Mostly insurers." "Insurers." "Don't." But she was smiling, a small, rueful thing, and for half a second Rory saw the girl on the fountain. Then it folded away. "Sit. Please. Or are you working?" Rory glanced at the bag. Somewhere in Bloomsbury, a bowl of egg-fried rice was going cold on someone's counter, and she had, at most, twenty minutes before Yu-Fei's nephew started ringing. "Ten minutes," she said, and took the stool. Silas set a glass of red in front of her without being asked, and a second, smaller measure of something amber in front of Meg, who opened her mouth to refuse it and then didn't. "I don't really drink anymore," Meg said, after he'd gone. She turned the tumbler a quarter turn on its coaster. "Not much. It's a long story. It's a boring story." "Those are the best kind." "Are they?" Meg looked at her then, properly, and Rory felt the look land on her hairline, her cheekbones, the cheap black jacket, the wrist. She did not pull her sleeve down. She'd stopped doing that a year ago. The crescent-shaped scar sat pale against the skin. "You cut your hair." "Years ago." "It suits you. You look..." Meg hunted for it. "Awake." It was such an odd, exact word that Rory had to take a sip of wine to cover it. "I was asleep before?" "I didn't say that." "You didn't have to." The bar hummed around them, ice and low talk, a saxophone folding itself into the ceiling from some speaker Rory had never located. Neither of them spoke. Rory could feel the conversation splitting into the two she might have: the one where they traded news like coins, *your mum, your dad, are you still in touch with Cerys*, and the other one, sitting underneath, patient as a stone. "Your mum sent a card to my mum," Meg said finally. "Last Christmas. Just to say you were safe. Mine told me. I think she thought I'd know what to do with it." "Did you?" "No." Meg's thumb worked at the band on her finger, around and around. "I kept meaning to write. I wrote it in my head a lot. I had whole paragraphs. They were good paragraphs." "Meg." "He was at my cousin's do, you know. Evan. Two summers after you left. He came up to me with a pint and asked how *you* were. Like you'd gone on holiday." She swallowed. "And I said fine. I said you were fine. I was so polite, Rory. I smiled." Rory said nothing. Her hand had found the stem of the glass and was holding it hard enough that she felt the pulse in her palm. "I introduced you," Meg said, low. "At that house party. I remember thinking, oh, they'd suit. He was so *charming* with the bar staff. I told you he was a good one." She laughed again, and this one broke in the middle. "And then that spring you stopped coming out, and I told myself you were revising. And you wore the long sleeves in May and I told myself you were cold. I had a whole vocabulary for it, do you understand? I was going to be a defender of the—" She stopped. Pressed two fingers under one eye, quick, like removing a lash. "And I didn't see one thing that was right in front of me." "You saw it," Rory said. It came out gentler than she'd have guessed. "Yes." "I didn't want you to. That's why I stopped coming out." She turned the wineglass. "I was very good at it, Meg. I could have fooled a jury." "That's not a comfort." "It isn't meant to be. It's just true." Rory looked at the wall behind the bottles, at a photograph of a rain-slick square with a lone figure crossing it, hat down, face lost. "I left because if I'd said goodbye to you, you'd have known, and then you'd have made me say it out loud. And I couldn't yet. I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry I didn't trust you with it." Meg was crying now without any noise, the way people do who've had practice in offices. She didn't wipe at it. "You don't get to apologize to me." "I'm doing it anyway." Something eased then, not forgiveness, nothing so tidy, but a slackening, like a rope let out an inch. Meg picked up the whisky and finally drank, and grimaced, and for a moment was twenty again, pulling a face at bad cider on a sticky floor. "Insurers," she said thickly. "God help me. I used to want to save people." "You still might." "I bill in six-minute increments." "So bill them for something worth it." Rory checked her phone: two missed calls from Yu-Fei's nephew. She stood, slung the bag onto her shoulder, and hesitated. Then she touched Meg's hand, briefly, the ringed one. "I'm at the flat above, most nights. Number's with Silas. Ring me. Not to talk about it. Just ring." Meg nodded, once, the blunt line of her hair swinging forward to hide her face. At the door Rory looked back. Behind the bar, Silas was studiously counting limes. The neon buzzed in the window. Meg sat alone with the sparkling water she'd abandoned and the whisky she hadn't, turning the glass a quarter turn, then another, as though it were a dial she might set to some earlier hour. Rory went out into the rain, and the pavement went green beneath her feet.