Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA1CQFTQVSQQ2WVBXTY9J9

The green neon above the door buzzed the way it always did, a hum that settled in the back of the teeth, and Rory pushed through under it with rain sliding off her hood. Thursday, late. The bar held its usual Soho crowd: a table of sound engineers squabbling over a mixing desk, a couple sitting close and not touching. She took the stool at the far end, where the old maps curled at their corners and she could see the bookshelf that hid the back room. Silas lifted a hand from behind the bar without looking up from the lemon he was cutting. "Usual?" "Something that doesn't taste like the Golden Empress's kitchen." "Then you'll have the Scotch." He set the glass down, the silver ring on his right hand catching the light, and shifted his weight off the bad knee. "Someone just came in behind you. Thought you'd want the warning." She turned on the stool. Owen Pryce stood on the mat with water pooling at the toes of his shoes. His overcoat was charcoal wool, cut close, the sort of coat that had never once been left on a bus seat. His hair had gone short at the sides and thin at the crown. He used to wear it in his eyes, and he used to shout across the Cardiff docks with his whole chest, and he used to be the first one in the water at every party on the Bay. Now he held the door handle like he wasn't sure whether he was allowed to let go. "Rory." "You're dripping on Silas's floor." He glanced down, then back up, and something in his face gave way for half a second before he got it back under control. "Still got the same mouth on you." "Still got the same timing, I see. Walk in on the one night I've had a bad shift." He came over slowly, and the sound engineers went quiet for a moment, the way a room does when somebody drops a tray. Owen took the stool two down from her and didn't sit straight. He hunched over the bar as if the stool was too tall for him. "Eva's cousin said you were in London," he said. "Said you'd dropped out of the course. Said you were riding a bike around Chinatown with food in a box on your back." "Delivery. Part-time. I'm not dropping anything in the Thames, if that's what she's been telling people." "I didn't think that." He almost smiled. "I never thought that." Silas slid a glass of something amber toward Owen without being asked, then went down the bar to polish a row of tumblers that did not need polishing. Rory watched him go. He was giving them room, the way he gave everyone room, and she resented it a little for being so good at it. "You look different," she said. "I'm a solicitor now. Conveyancing, mostly. Houses, boundaries, who's allowed to put a fence where." He turned the glass. "I haven't had a drink since March. That's the other thing you'd notice, if you were looking." "I wasn't looking." "No. You weren't." The bar went on around them. Someone called for a bottle of prosecco. The neon hummed. "How's your mum?" Rory asked. Owen's jaw worked. "She's gone. Two winters ago. Chest, in the end." He drank, and set the glass down with great care. "I was going to tell you. I wrote you a letter. Care of Eva's, because you'd changed your number again." "I got it." "Did you read it?" "I read it." "And?" She looked at the maps on the wall, at the faded coastline of some country she'd never visited. "And I didn't write back, Owen. That's the answer. You know what it is." "I was hoping you'd tell me it was a different one." "You were hoping I'd come back to Cardiff. Both of us in the car at four in the morning, the way we'd planned, the way you swore we'd do after the exams." She heard her own voice tighten and let it. "I had a flat in Stockwell and a bag of clothes and a ticket for the morning train, and you had your father's car keys and a hospital corridor. I went. You stayed. Neither of us was wrong, and that's exactly why it's shite to think about." He nodded slowly, like a man accepting a summons. "I used to think you left because you were angry with me." "I left because I was frightened of who I'd turn into if I stayed in that town with my name on a list of things I was supposed to become." She picked up her Scotch, found her hand was steady, and was almost annoyed by it. "Turns out I was right about that, at least. Just not in the way I'd planned." Owen looked at her then, really looked, the way he used to when they were fifteen and she had told him something that frightened her. Some of the coldness left his shoulders. "Are you happy?" he asked. Rory considered lying. She could feel the shape of the lie sitting ready in her mouth, neat and easy, the kind of answer that closed a conversation. Across the bar, Silas had stopped polishing. He was watching the mirror, not them, which was its own kind of courtesy. "Ask me again in a year," she said.