AI The green neon raven above the doorway hummed in the rain, a small insectile buzz that bled into the constant, shivering drizzle along the alley. Rory shook her hood back and ducked inside, damp air following her, the smell of wet wool cut by citrus cleaner and old varnish. The Raven’s Nest breathed the way it always did—low lamps, brass rails worn to the color of coins, old maps and black-and-white photos covering the walls like a memory someone had taken a pen to. A Billie Holiday record rasped from the corner until silence swallowed it; Silas must have let the needle run out.
He glanced up from polishing a glass. The overhead light caught the silver signet ring on his right hand, flicked once like a signal and went. He nodded at her, mouth lifting. “Long night?”
“Loch of soup spilled on my left trainer, bloke on Old Compton tried to pay me with Canadian dollars,” Rory said, pushing the damp hood down off her shoulder-length hair. The ends flipped water at her neck. She tapped the scar on her wrist with a thumb the way she did without meaning to. “You know. High glamour.”
Silas made a sympathetic noise, the kind that came from the back of his throat. He moved with his slight left-legged hitch toward the tap. “Ginger beer and lime?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “And a towel.”
She dropped onto her usual stool two in from the end. The wood was warm from bodies, the varnish nicked with hieroglyphs of keys and zips. The towel came folded across his forearm like a maître d’s joke. She took it gratefully, blotted her hair, her hands. When she look ed up again, the woman at the far stool had turned halfway, like a hinge creaking.
“Aurora?”
The name hit her in the ribs. No one called her that except bureaucrats and the occasional teacher who wanted to be formal. She didn’t answer at first. The voice threaded through her. She knew the shape of it. She’d known the shape of it drunk on a duvet at two in the morning, eating dry cereal out of the box, high on caffeine and deadlines. She had known it bleary and scornful across seminar tables: honestly, Carter, that’s specious as hell.
Rory turned slowly .
The girl she used to know wore charity-shop coats and cigarette-ash eyeliner, a rotation of thrifted jumpers like shed skins, hair a rusty tangle pinned with the same plastic clip. The woman on the stool had a grey suit tailored close enough to argue with air. Her hair was a dark bob that ended sharply at her jaw. A watch with a clean face sat on one wrist; no bracelets, no slouch. Even her posture had changed. She didn’t fold herself over her drink the way Eleri always had. She sat tall, profile lined into its best version.
“Shit,” Rory said, softly . She didn’t plan it. There was the pale, heart-shaped face beneath glass skin. There were the same sea-glass eyes, only less foggy with sleep deprivation and more cut. “Eleri?”
A smile came and went across Eleri’s mouth, as if it wasn’t something she was used to wearing now. “I thought it was you. For a moment I thought—no. But then I saw your eyes.” She tilted a finger towards Rory’s face. “Still dangerous.”
Rory’s laugh was short. “Yours are blunted.”
“Are they?” Eleri touched the rim of her glass. “I’ll take that as a mercy. God, Aurora. Look at you.”
Rory wanted to cover herself with the towel again, absurdly, as if she were caught between outfit changes. “No, let’s not. It’s worse under fluorescent light.” She gestured around. “I live upstairs.”
“You—what.” Eleri’s eyebrows lifted. The motion wasn’t as dramatic as it once had been. “You live here?”
“Above here, not under the bar. I’m not a troll.” Rory wet her lip, reached for the ginger beer. The lime sang against her tongue. “Silas—” she tipped her chin in his direction; he had drifted to the far end to give them space, but he was listening with that professional not-listening of a man who knew how to pretend he wasn’t doing anything so deliberate. “He’s my landlord.”
Eleri glanced down the bar. There was polite acknowledgement in the line of her neck. “You always did adopt men with old-story faces.” She glanced at the walls, the maps, a photograph of a woman in a cloche hat look ing over her shoulder as if she could see them. “What is this place?”
“Home,” Rory said, and heard the defensiveness in it and wanted to eat it back down. “And a bar. ‘The Raven’s Nest.’ He runs a mishmash,” she said quickly , to fill the hole. “Quizzes on Tuesdays. Jazz sometimes. People who lie to themselves with finesse, mostly.”
Eleri’s mouth twitched. “So, London.” She took a sip from her drink and didn’t make a face at whatever it was. Eleri had loved sweet things at uni. She had kept the sugar packets from cafés for the thrill of thinking she was stealing them. “I’m here for a conference,” she said. “I thought I’d walk. I liked the sign.”
Rory thought of the humming green raven over the door, flickering in the rain. “Yeah. He had it made. Says it keeps the worst people out. Don’t know how that works.”
“Gorgeous bit of hypocrisy,” Eleri said. “If it keeps anything out, it keeps the cautious. The worst always think signs are for other people.”
They were laughing . It was almost easy. There were decades inside their muscles, or there were only four years and a page-rip of a night that had split one life from another. Rory let herself look at Eleri properly. No nose ring now. The fine pale scar across Eleri’s right eyebrow still there from falling off a bike in Year Ten. And that watch. Not just clean. Expensive. The kind of expensive you didn’t buy for yourself until your tax bracket stopped needing you to joke about it.
“What do you do?” Rory asked. She kept her tone casual, though she had already guessed. It hung on Eleri like a tag.
“Corporate. Solicitor.” Eleri said it as if she were reciting a dietary restriction. “Before you roll your eyes—yes, I know.”
“I wasn’t going to roll my eyes.” Rory was going to roll her entire skull. She held it still now. “You used to spit at the word.”
“I still spit, sometimes,” Eleri said softly , surprising her. “Not on people. Behind bins. It’s not the same.” She did something then with her hands, the fond pat you did to a dog you no longer owned. “The firm does pro bono. I tell myself stories. It’s a habit you encouraged, if I remember right.”
“You remember selectively,” Rory said. All the things she hadn’t wanted to know lined up and sat like bad kids at the back of a classroom. She touched the towel, folded it to a thinner edge, ran it under her fingers. “What’s the conference?”
“Artificial intelligence and regulatory frameworks. Which is to say, several days of men named Henry telling me how to be careful with knives.” Eleri’s smile curved. “Your mother would have loved it. She’d have come just to heckle the Q&A.”
Rory flinched. It wasn’t a big movement, just a ripple. Eleri saw it. Of course she saw it. Eleri saw every thing and always had. “You keep track?” Rory asked, aiming for lightness. It came out brittle.
“Facebook tells me every thing,” Eleri said, lying clumsily. She took a breath. “Your mum’s garden look ed beautiful in June. She was growing those ridiculous foxgloves again.”
“She likes the way the bees crawl inside,” Rory said, voice thinner than she wanted. She had not called home in two weeks. She had told herself London worked better if you pretended it was its own country with no ferries attached.
Silas ambled down the bar, half-limp disguised by habit. He set down another lime wedge by Rory’s glass, then slid a small bowl between them—peanuts, mixed with little pretzel pieces. The pretzels were always what people ate first. His signet ring flashed and stilled. “You need anything else, Laila?” he asked, using the name he sometimes chose when there were faces in the bar he didn’t like for her to be associated with her government name.
“Fine,” Rory said. It was habit to play the game. Eleri’s gaze flickered to Silas’s face, to the ring, back to Rory with that sharp quick math she did without paper. Silas inclined his head to Eleri, father-of-the-bride formal, and limped away.
“Laila,” Eleri said.
“He calls me things,” Rory said, shrugging. She kept her fingers off the peanuts. They were a trap. “You know me. I collect names like they’re receipts.”
“You ripped up a lot of receipts,” Eleri said, and for a first time the humor dropped and something else lay there.
Rory took in breath like cold. “I didn’t come here to argue.”
“You came here with your life, which is another matter,” Eleri said. She had taken out that precise tone from a case folder and was using it on Rory. She must have caught herself because she winced and softened it. “I’m not here to do whatever this is. It’s good to see you. You look —” she shook her head. “You look like someone who can sleep.”
“It’s the late nights that fool you,” Rory said. She stared at the maps on the wall. Africa in sepia. The city grid of Prague with arrows inked in a hand that was not Silas’s. She traced borders with her eyes as if they had something to do with hers. “If you’d asked me at twenty, I’d have said you’d be the one living under a bar and I’d be the one in a suit.”
“Ah,” Eleri said. It was a nothing sound, the sound around things that couldn’t be unburned. “We were very certain at twenty.”
“I was very certain,” Rory said. “You were very loud.”
Eleri laughed softly . “We liked to pretend it was the same thing.”
The rain against the window sounded closer all at once, as if someone had opened the glass and the weather had leaned in to hear. The bar door opened and a gust wore its wet coat into the room. A group came in, leather jackets, umbrella ribs dripping. They took the table by the jukebox and argued briefly over a song. Somebody fed a coin in. A trumpet stuttered awake.
“Do you want to dance ?” Eleri asked. The question was absurd—neither of them had ever dance d except sloppily and only when dared. There was a challenge in it, or an apology.
“No,” Rory said. She put her elbows on the bar. The towel made a small neat rectangle before her like an altar cloth. “Do you want to pretend we’ll meet up all the time now? Because that’s the part where I lie and you lie and we both feel good and then we don’t do it.”
Eleri’s jaw flexed. “You don’t have to punish me for not being able to fix it.”
“I’m not—Jesus, Eleri.” Rory felt the old flare, that heat that had once powered a hundred arguments and a dozen papers and one never-acted play. She look ed at her left wrist and followed the crescent scar with her nail like a child tracing the moon. “I left,” she said softly . “We can put any words you want around it. I left and I didn’t tell most people why. I wasn’t thinking about you. I wasn’t thinking at all. I ran.”
“I know why,” Eleri said. Her voice was almost flat. “He told me enough. And not enough. Especially then.”
Rory’s stomach did a small, involuntary turn. Evan’s name had not been said and here it lay anyway, slick with unsaid. “He told you things.”
“He told me versions. He was good at versions.” Eleri rolled her glass between her palms, look ed down into it. “When you went, he cried on me. That’s not even a metaphor. In our kitchen, which you remember—God, the mould. He said he didn’t know what he’d done. He said—” She exhaled. “He said a lot of things. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t not. I didn’t know I was allowed to know. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand,” Rory said. Her throat hurt in a way that had very little to do with anything romantic. “You were twenty-one. I was twenty-two and I didn’t know either until I did.”
“I should have come after you,” Eleri said into her drink. “I should have look ed for you.”
Rory pictured Eleri on a train with one of those terrible floral bags they used to share for weekend trips, Eleri’s coat on top, a notebook, a pen. She pictured it clearly enough that for a second she thought it had happened, that she had simply missed her. “I wasn’t somewhere someone could follow me,” she said. “I changed my number. I stopped using my email. I was good at arithmetic when it came to subtracting myself from things.”
Eleri’s mouth was crooked . “You always were clever. It was your hobby.”
“And yours was precision,” Rory said. “Which is why that suit look s like it’s terrified of you.”
“The suit is terrified of my dry cleaner,” Eleri said, and they both smiled because jokes were squares you could hop on over landmines.
Silas drifted back again, his limp more visible now that the after-work rush had passed and he didn’t need to move quick. He topped up Eleri’s glass without asking, a courtesy that pretended they were old regulars and so didn’t require permission. “On the house,” he said. He didn’t look at Rory when he said it, but he rested his hand for a second on the bar beside her towel, signet ring catching a sliver of lamp light. It was steadiness, offered like a handrail you didn’t need to hold to feel.
Eleri traced the rim with a fingertip. “He’s protective,” she said when Silas was gone again.
“He’s familiar with accidents,” Rory said. “He knows how not to let glass shatter if you can help it.”
“That seems like a good person to live above.”
“It is.” Rory swallowed. The ginger beer was warm now, the lime rind bittering.
“So.” Eleri stared at the map of London above the optics, the tangle of roads and rails bleeding into colorless rivers. “Do we tell stories, then? The curated ones. I can tell you about a man with a marina who tried to sue us for the tide not respecting his investment.”
“Tell me that,” Rory said, leaning in, grateful for the shape of the ridiculous. And Eleri told it, and her voice got brighter. It was the old brightness, the toast-and-tea brightness, as if she’d put that old clip back in her hair. Rory listened and remembered sitting on a kitchen floor at three in the morning with Eleri’s bare feet cold on her thighs, both of them arguing about case law while a pot of pasta slowly furred over. She felt, for a moment, an ache like a bruise you forgot why you had.
When the story ended, the ache stayed. Eleri look ed at her directly. “And you? Golden Empress? You run around like Hermes and get stiffed by expats?”
Rory snorted. “Golden Empress pays on time and Yu-Fei feeds me when I look like a drowned rat. There are worse lives. I get to see London in slices. I make a map that no one else has. By places, not roads.”
“That sounds like you,” Eleri said, surprising her again. “Always wanting the underlay. The thing beneath the thing.”
Rory turned her glass in her hands. The condensation knocked loose a small line of water that crawled across the bar and was drunk by the wood. “Do you ever miss it?” she said carefully , hating herself for even asking. “The way we were.”
“I miss the arrogance,” Eleri said instantly. “The belief that the future was a vending machine and you just had to find the right coin. I miss not knowing how bones break.”
“Glorious optimism.”
“Stupidity dressed in white,” Eleri said. She look ed at Rory. “I miss you.”
The thing you were supposed to say to that was something like same, or me too, if one were behaving . Rory let the silence sit. She heard rain. She felt the itch of the towel fibres under her finger pads. She thought of nights in Cardiff when they had lain under posters of bands they’d never see, breath fogging the window, and believed that leaving meant transformation, not escape. She thought of leaving not as a triumphant march but as a flinch.
“I miss the idea of me you had,” she said finally. “It was elegant.”
“It was biased,” Eleri said. “But it was interesting.” A beat. “Can I ask a stupid question?”
“You put men named Henry through their paces at conferences. You’re immune.”
“Did you love him?”
The word love arced through the air and broke over the floor without a sound. Rory could not tell whether Eleri meant love or some other word that people used for the same complicated weight . She was twenty-five and tired and the past sat on the bar like a third drink.
“I loved what I thought might happen if I were good,” Rory said. Her throat was rubble. “He had a way of making that seem possible. That’s the trick, isn’t it? That’s all it is.”
Eleri closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t asked to fix it.”
“I wasn’t asked to be absent either.” Eleri opened her eyes. There was wet in them that she did not blink away. “I should have been brave.”
“You were twenty-one,” Rory said again, softer, and did not add that she should have been brave too, that the kind of brave they had practiced in tutorials did not translate to rooms with closed doors.
They sat with it. The room bruited. Someone told a joke and it landed like a plate. Silas charmed a couple into paying their tab with more grace than they had brought in. A man in the corner drew a wineglass with a pencil onto a napkin and then drew a smaller one inside it.
Eleri put money on the bar even though Silas had said on the house. Old habits. She slid off the stool. The suit flexed to accommodate her. “I should go,” she said. She smoothed the front of her jacket with both palms, the way you did when you were putting your armor back on after scratching an itch under it. “I’ll be back in London next month. I could—” She stopped. She look ed at Rory, and there was the younger face superimposed for an instant, the girl in the charity-shop coat asking crazy, serious questions at four in the morning. “I could send you an email. Not a receipt. A letter.”
Rory opened her mouth. She closed it. The tide came in, sighed along the marina of the moment, and slid out again.
“Send it,” she said.
Eleri nodded once. Relief or disappointment checked itself and look ed respectable. “Goodnight, Aurora.” She made it beautiful, the way you could if you allowed a name to be what it was instead of a lever.
“Goodnight, Eleri.” Rory watched her go. The green neon outside flared along the wet on Eleri’s shoulders as she stepped into the street. Then the door swung back and every thing went a little darker because the sign was blocked by the wood for a second and because Eleri was gone .
Silas came to stand where Eleri had been, propped a hip against the bar, the signet ring luminescing under the lamp. He didn’t say anything for a while. He knew how to leave a patch of quiet unscraped.
“How’s the tide?” he asked finally.
“Doing what it does,” Rory said. Her voice was conversational. Her chest felt as if someone had propped a book inside it, something heavy and damp. “Flood. Ebb.”
Silas’s mouth bent. “You’re all right?”
“I’m here,” Rory said. It was both a boast and a confession. She folded the towel, folded it again until it was a tight white square. “She’s a solicitor.”
“Mm,” Silas said, as if that answered a question she hadn’t asked. “They often are, later. All that arguing has to go somewhere it can charge a fee.”
Rory huffed.
He drifted away and came back with a glass of water, set it beside her ginger beer without comment. She drank it. The cold spread along her throat. Outside, the rain had softened into something like static. She imagined Eleri walking toward the hotel, collar up, watch ticking, the suit making her a small ship in a wet city.
Rory tilted her head at the maps. She had never learned to love them as maps. She loved them as pictures. They promised you could look from far enough away and make sense of it. Maybe that was their lie. Maybe the point was to see it close, get lost, feel your way out with your hands on brick and your heart beating.
Her phone buzzed once in her pocket—a text from Yu-Fei about an early lunch shift tomorrow, a smiley face made of parentheses because Yu-Fei refused emojis. Rory thumbed back a yes. Her scar itched. She scratched it and thought of bees inside foxgloves.
She could feel, in the space left where Eleri had been sitting, the shape of argument and apology both, cooling on the wood like a spilled drink. There would be an email. Or there wouldn’t. They would try, maybe, and the trying would be its own kind of honesty. Or it would be a receipt. People kept receipts even when they meant nothing, in case they needed to prove to themselves later that they had bought something once.
Silas reached over, flicked the Billie Holiday record awake. The needle caught and Anita O’Day came through instead, bright and sly. Rory smiled despite herself. She finished her ginger beer. She took her folded towel and set it on the bar. She’d take the stairs slow tonight, listening to the song find its way along the walls.
Home was above the bar. It was behind her and under her and soaked through her jumper. It wasn’t elegant. It was a place where she added up days until they made a different shape.
She stood, her stool scraping respectful against the floor. “Night, Si,” she said.
Silas raised a glass in a small salute. “Night, Laila.”
The neon raven hummed to itself in the rain, uncaring, almost kindly. Rory headed upstairs, shoulder grazed by photographs, hands trailing along the banister she’d smoothed with all her evenings. The door to the flat clicked behind her like the spine of a book, closing a chapter without promising another, only acknowledging the one you had.