AI The night had settled into that slow, viscous hour when even Soho seemed to exhale. The Raven’s Nest hummed at half-volume: a low murmur of conversation, the clink of glass, the far-off wail of a siren slipping past on the wet street outside. Green neon from the sign above the door bled through the front window, tinting the raindrops clinging to the glass an otherworldly emerald.
Rory stood behind the bar, twisting a damp cloth inside a highball glass until it squeaked. Her fingers moved on autopilot. She’d been on her feet since noon—delivery runs for Yu-Fei, then back here to help Silas cover the evening crowd—and her lower back ached in that dull, familiar way. Above the bar, the old maps on the walls watched her like faded witnesses, the black-and-white photographs catching every flicker of movement in their lacquered surfaces.
Silas leaned beside the till, limping slightly as he shifted weight from one leg to the other. He was talking in a low voice to a man in a navy blazer, his hazel eyes intent, his hand resting near—but not on—the other man’s phone. The silver signet ring on his right hand caught the warm light when he gestured. From where she stood, Rory could see only the corner of a map of Prague behind them, the edges curled and yellowed.
The door opened, letting in a slice of cold air and the hiss of tyres on wet tarmac. Rory glanced up out of habit.
A woman stepped in, shaking the rain from a dark coat. She paused on the threshold, eyes adjusting to the dim amber light. For a moment, Rory saw only the coat—expensive, tailored, the sort of thing you didn’t buy from a high street sale rack. Then the woman pushed back her hood.
Rory’s hand froze inside the glass.
The face was older, of course. Faces always were; that was the little cruelty of memory. There were faint lines at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there before, and the hair that had once been a wild, coppery tangle was sleeker now, pinned and disciplined into a twist at the nape of her neck. A thin silver band glinted on her left hand as she brushed a raindrop from her cheek.
But the eyes. The eyes were the same. Dark, sharp, restless, like they were always tracking something just past your shoulder.
Rory set the glass down too quickly , the rim kissing the bartop with a soft crack. A few drops of water leapt onto her fingers.
No. It couldn’t be. It had been—
“Evening,” Silas called, his voice smooth and practiced. “In or takeaway from the cold?”
The woman smiled faintly and stepped further in. “In, definitely. God, it’s chucking it down out there.”
The accent hit her first: that soft, lilting Cardiff edge, blunted by years away but still there under the London polish. Rory felt something inside her lurch .
The woman’s gaze travelled over the bar, the bottles, the maps. Then it landed on Rory.
She watched the moment of disbelief pass over the woman’s face, the quick flicker of uncertainty, like a radio catching a station and then losing it. Then: recognition, sharp and bright as a match being struck .
“Laila?” the woman said.
No one had called her that in years. Not since sixth form. The name slid through the air like a ghost.
Rory’s throat went dry. “Eva?”
For a second, neither of them moved. The bar noise seemed to drop away, like someone had turned down the volume on the world.
Then Eva laughed—short, incredulous, half-strangled. She pushed a hand through her hair, dislodging a few pins. “Bloody hell. It is you.”
Silas’s eyes flicked between them with the quick, assessing glance he always wore when something unexpected walked through his door. Then he straightened, his limp slowing his backwards step.
“You two know each other, then,” he said lightly .
“Childhood friend,” Rory managed. Her voice sounded unfamiliar to her own ears, huskier, like she’d been shouting. “From Cardiff.”
“Ah.” Silas nodded once, the single syllable carrying an unreadable amount of understanding. “I’ll give you both a minute, shall I?” He patted the bar twice. “What are you having, love?”
Eva tore her gaze from Rory with visible effort and turned to him. “Uh—glass of red? House is fine. I’m not fussy.”
“Liar,” Rory said, because the past had a way of slipping in when she wasn’t watching . “You used to send back wine if it was two degrees too warm.”
Eva’s mouth twitched. “You remember that?”
“I remember every thing.” The words came out more bitter than she intended.
Silas slid a glass onto the counter, poured with the ease of long habit. “On the house,” he said. “Reunions are good for business.” He flicked a glance at Rory, a silent question—You all right?—and when she dropped her gaze, he drifted away down the bar, his limp a soft, uneven rhythm on the worn wooden floor.
Eva picked up the glass and held it between both hands like it might steady her. Close up, Rory could see details she’d missed from across the room: the faint smudge of tiredness under her eyes, the tiny scar along her jaw that hadn’t been there before, pale and thin as a thread.
“You look—” Eva began, then stopped. Her eyebrows rose, an old battle with honesty playing out behind her eyes. “Different,” she settled on.
Rory snorted. “That’s one way to put it.”
“You cut your hair.” Eva’s gaze travelled from Rory’s straight, shoulder-length black hair to the plain black T-shirt, the faded jeans, the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist where the edge of the bar light caught it. Once, that scar had been the centre of a whole stupid story about a trampoline and a broken glass; Eva had been there, shrieking with laughter as they’d wrapped it in a cartoon plaster. “And you—work here?”
“I live upstairs,” Rory said. “Deliveries for the Golden Empress during the day, help out behind the bar sometimes.” She busied her hands with stacking coasters, aligning their corners, anything to avoid the way Eva was looking at her, as though she’d walked into a parallel universe.
Eva let out a low whistle. “That’s… not where I thought you’d be.”
“Yeah, well. Pre-Law spits you out eventually.”
“That’s not what your mum told me.”
Rory’s fingers stilled on the coasters. “You’ve spoken to my mum?”
“Not recently.” Eva took a small sip of wine, buying herself time. “A couple of years after you, you know. Left. I bumped into her at the supermarket in Roath. She said you were doing well. Busy with your course. She looked… proud.”
A hot flush crept up Rory’s neck. “She lied,” she said flatly.
Silence slid between them, thickening the air.
Eva set her glass down carefully . “Can we—sit? Or is that going to get you yelled at by your boss?”
“He’s fine.” Rory flicked a glance down the bar. Silas had disappeared through the doorway that led to the back—ostensibly the storeroom. Eva had no way of knowing about the hidden door behind the bookshelf, the other conversations that sometimes happened there. “We’ve got a quiet patch.”
They found a small table near the back, half in shadow beneath a framed photograph of three men in trench coats on a foggy bridge. Rory chose the seat that let her face the door without thinking about it. Eva shrugged off her coat and draped it over the back of her chair. Underneath, she wore a navy blouse, simple gold chain at her throat, black trousers pressed to a perfect crease.
“You look like a solicitor,” Rory said.
Eva gave a small, wry smile. “Close. Employment barrister. Chambers in Gray’s Inn.”
Rory let out a low, disbelieving huff. “Of course you bloody did it.”
“What, got out?” Eva tilted her head. “We both said we would.”
“I said I would. You said you’d marry rich and move to Barcelona.”
“Plans changed.” Eva’s hand drifted to the silver band on her finger, then fell away again. “You’re not even a little bit impressed I wear a wig and argue in front of judges for a living?”
“I’m Irish. We argue for a living,” Rory said automatically, thinking of her father, of heated dinners and talk of case law and duty and all the things she’d walked away from. “And you always liked an audience.”
It should have been easy—this part. The teasing, the trading of jabs. They’d once been experts at it, two girls who spoke in sarcasm because sincerity felt too raw on their tongues. But every line they exchanged now seemed to land wrong, the rhythm off, the beat they used to share gone missing.
“How long has it been?” Eva asked quietly.
Rory thought back, counting by landmarks rather than years. “Since that New Year’s at the bay. Fireworks, cheap prosecco.”
“Where you threw up behind the Senedd building.”
“Where you pushed me first.”
Eva smiled, the memory smoothing some of the tension from her face. “We were twenty. God. So… five years?”
“Six.” Rory traced the edge of the worn wooden table with one finger. “Six and a bit.”
“Feels longer,” Eva said.
Rory didn’t answer. For her, time had splintered; some nights in London stretched on forever, a single bad hour looping in her chest, while whole months back home had folded neatly into a single scent, a single sound.
“You just… vanished, Rory.” Eva’s voice gentled on the name. “One day you’re texting me about jurisprudence and how boring your lectures are, and the next—nothing. I thought you were ghosting me, at first. That I’d done something.” She shook her head, lips twisting. “I rang. I messaged. Your WhatsApp last seen just froze.”
“I dropped my phone,” Rory said. The lie arrived out of nowhere—small, cowardly. “On the train. Lost all my numbers.”
She saw, in the set of Eva’s shoulders, that she didn’t buy it entirely. “You could have got them back.”
“I didn’t want to,” Rory said, more sharply than she meant to. She met Eva’s gaze then, forcing herself to hold it. “Cardiff was… done.”
Eva stared at her for a long beat, something like hurt flicker ing in her eyes and then settling into something more complicated. Acceptance. Resentment. She wrapped her hands around her wine glass, fingers tensing.
“Was it him?” she asked quietly. “Evan?”
The name slid through Rory like a blade dulled by use. She swallowed, tongue thick in her mouth.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said.
“Okay.” Eva’s agreement came too quickly , the way you might say okay to a stranger’s boundary if you wanted to prove you were the kind of person who respected such things. “It’s just—last time we saw each other, you’d taken him back. Again. And I’d… we’d had that fight . In Chippy Alley.”
Rory remembered it with uncomfortable clarity: fluorescent lights, the smell of vinegar and old oil, the cold drizzle misting down. Eva’s voice, loud over the crowd: You keep going back, Laila. I don’t know who you are anymore. And Rory, stung and defensive, spitting back something she regretted even as she said it.
“You said I liked the drama,” Rory murmured, eyes on the table.
Eva’s shoulders slumped. “I know. Jesus. I think about that night more often than I’d like to admit.” She let out a breath . “I was twenty-three and full of opinions I thought were wisdom. It’s not an excuse. I knew he was… bad for you. I just didn’t know how to say it without making it sound like I was calling you stupid.”
Rory’s fingers drifted to the small scar on her wrist, pressing there until a muted ache bloomed. “Maybe I was stupid.”
“Don’t.” Eva’s voice sharpened. “That’s his story. Don’t repeat his story.”
Rory looked up, surprised by the heat there. For a moment, she saw the girl Eva had been: ferocious, loyal to the point of self-destruction, always ready to bite back on Rory’s behalf.
“You disappeared,” Eva said softly . “And then a year later, I heard from Nia that you’d left uni. That you were in London. No one had your number. I thought—” She broke off, jaw tightening. “I thought I’d pushed you away. That if I’d handled it differently, if I’d… I don’t know. Come round more. Taken you home that night instead of just telling you to leave him. Maybe you wouldn’t have—”
“It wasn’t about you,” Rory cut in. The words tasted strange: both cruel and kind. “Eva, you were—what? Twenty-three? You didn’t ruin my life.”
“Someone did,” Eva said. “And I wasn’t there. I was supposed to be your—” She bit down on the last word, but Rory heard it anyway. Lifeline.
The old maps on the wall rustled in a draught from the door. Somewhere near the front, a glass shattered and Silas’s low baritone rose, unflustered, soothing the apologies of whoever had dropped it.
“I left because I had to leave,” Rory said. “It wasn’t dramatic. It was… quiet. Packing a bag and getting on a train before he finished a shift. Changing my name on the buzzer. Getting very good at not picking up calls from numbers I didn’t know.”
“Laila—Rory.” Eva corrected herself midstream. “I’m so sorry.”
“There it is,” Rory said. “The apology.”
Eva flinched, then let out a brittle laugh. “What, did you rehearse that line ?”
“Do you want me to tell you that it’s fine? That you did your best? That’s how these things go, isn’t it?” Rory’s chest felt tight, her words wobbling on a line between anger and exhaustion. “We bump into each other in a bar, you say sorry, I say sorry, we like each other’s photos on Instagram and spend the rest of our lives occasionally thinking about how we could have handled our twenties better.”
Eva looked down at her hands. A thin white indentation marked the base of her ring finger where the band sat. “Is that what you want?”
Rory opened her mouth, then closed it. What did she want? For time to spool backwards until they were seventeen again, lying on the grass in Bute Park, making impossible plans. For Evan to be a name that meant nothing. For her parents to think she was still on track, that their sacrifices had planted her somewhere solid.
Instead she was living above a bar run by a retired spy, delivering chow mein and duck spring rolls on a battered scooter, counting her tips in coins that smelled of metal and other people’s skin.
“You’re married,” Rory said, because it was simpler to point at the obvious.
Eva glanced at the ring, a half-smile tugging at her lips. “Separated.”
“Oh.”
“Two years ago.” She rolled the stem of her glass between her fingers. “Turns out I’m better at cross-examining witnesses than I am at living with another human being.”
Rory found herself wanting to ask what had gone wrong—infidelity, boredom, simple erosion—but stopped. It felt too symmetrical, like the universe had decided that both of them needed their relational failures filed neatly in the same drawer.
“Kids?” she asked instead.
Eva shook her head. “No. You?”
Rory barked out a laugh. “God, no.” Then, more quietly: “I could barely keep a cactus alive in my last flat.”
“I remember,” Eva said, and something in her face softened. “You overwatered it. It drowned.”
“It was supposed to be indestructible.” Rory leaned back in her chair, exhaling slowly . “We’re not those girls anymore.”
“No.” Eva’s gaze drifted to the photograph above them, to the men on the bridge, their faces turned away, their futures unknown. “I miss them, sometimes. Us, I mean. Even when I’m not sure I’d like them if they walked in here right now.”
Rory imagined her younger self stepping through the door: fringe in her eyes, arms full of law textbooks and cheap bottle wine from Tesco, Evan’s hand heavy on her shoulder. She imagined Eva at nineteen, eyeliner smudged, laughing too loud, daring the world to tell her no.
“I’d want to shake her,” Rory said. “Tell her to run sooner. To listen.”
“Would she?” Eva asked.
“No,” Rory admitted. “She only listened to people who told her what she wanted to hear.”
Eva smiled, small and rueful. “Same girl I knew, then.”
They fell into silence again, but this one felt different—less like a wall and more like a space they were both tiptoeing through.
From the bar, Silas’s voice floated over. “Last orders in fifteen, folks.”
Rory glanced at the clock behind the counter and blinked. Time had slipped. The ache in her lower back had faded, replaced by a familiar, buzzing tiredness behind her eyes.
“I should—” she began.
“Yeah.” Eva pushed her chair back, reaching for her coat. “Early start. Judge who hates late counsel. Ancient privilege of Her Majesty’s courts and all that.” She shrugged into the coat and hesitated, fingers half-curled around the lapel. “Can I ask you something?”
“Depends what it is.”
“Is this… it?” Eva’s gaze flicked around the bar—the scuffed floor, the old maps, the handful of regulars hunched over their pints. “For you, I mean. The Nest, the deliveries. Or is it just… where you’ve landed for now?”
The question landed between them like a coin. Heads, you tell the truth. Tails, you tell the other truth.
Rory thought of the law textbooks gathering dust in a box under her bed upstairs, their spines faded, pages annotated in a younger, neater hand. She thought of Silas and his quiet network, the way he always seemed to be steering her towards something just out of sight. She thought of the way, sometimes, late at night, she’d stand in front of the mirror and not recognise the woman looking back.
“For now,” she said. “I think.”
Eva studied her, as if adjusting to this version of her, adding new data to an old file. Then she nodded, slow. “Okay.”
She reached into her bag and pulled out a business card, sliding it across the table. The cardstock was thick, expensive. Eva Morgan, Barrister, the print declared in sober black. Chambers address. Phone number. Email.
“I know you’ve got a whole complicated relationship with reaching out,” Eva said, attempting lightness and almost getting there. “But if you ever… need anything. Or just want to get a coffee and talk about how much we hate landlord law.”
Rory picked up the card. It felt heavier than it should. “I don’t even own a proper suit,” she said.
“Wear what you like,” Eva said. “I’ve seen you argue your way out of worse with a hangover and a crumpled hoodie.”
Rory hesitated, then pulled a napkin towards her and scrawled her number on it with a biro from her pocket. Her handwriting had changed—sharper, smaller.
“Here,” she said, pushing it across.
Eva took it, folding the napkin with surprising care. “I’m going to call you,” she said. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But I’m going to. So if you vanish again…” She trailed off, the rest unsaid.
“I won’t lose my phone this time,” Rory said.
They stood, an awkward choreography of limbs and glances. For a second, it looked like they might hug, but the years between them were too solid, too present. They settled for a half-step forward, then back.
“Take care of yourself, Laila,” Eva said softly , the old name slipping out like a benediction.
Rory swallowed. “You too.”
Eva turned and walked towards the door. The green neon sign painted her coat as she stepped out into the rain.
Rory watched until the door swung shut behind her. Only then did she realise she’d been holding her breath.
“Old ghosts, eh?” Silas’s voice came from her elbow. She hadn’t heard him approach. He leaned against the empty table, favouring his good leg, ring glinting .
“She’s not a ghost,” Rory said. “She’s—”
“Alive?” Silas offered.
Rory turned the business card over in her fingers, the edges digging lightly into her skin. “Yeah,” she said. “She is.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded once, as if that confirmed something for him. “Close up for me, will you? I’ve got a call to make.”
“Sure,” she said.
When he limped away, she went behind the bar and began the small rituals of closing: wiping surfaces, stacking chairs, turning glasses upside down. Outside, the rain continued, indifferent and steady, washing the city clean in patches that would be dirty again by morning.
On the shelf behind her, the old maps waited, their countries and borders fixed in ink, pretending that the world could be contained that neatly. In her pocket, the business card warmed against her thigh.
She didn’t know yet whether she would call. Whether she wanted to reopen a door she’d once slammed so thoroughly shut. But for the first time in a long while, the future didn’t feel like a blank hallway or a locked room. It felt like a street she hadn’t walked down yet, slick with rain, green neon flicker ing at the far end.
She wiped the last ring of moisture from the bartop, turned out the lights, and let the darkness settle around her like a pause, full of things not yet said.