Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQSV415S8KB1E3CP3VCAFG

The green neon raven outside the window blinked in its slow, tired rhythm, staining the condensation on the glass an electric, sickly jade. Aurora Carter—Rory to everyone who knew her before life got complicated—watched it pulse as she cupped her hands around a sweating gin and tonic. The ice clinked when she lifted it, catching the light from the bar’s low-hanging brass lamps. Six deliveries tonight, three of them to people who hadn’t bothered to say thank you. A thundercloud of scooters and buses and tourists, and then the climb up the narrow stairs above the bar with the cardboard smell of other people’s takeaways in her hair. Her thighs still hummed faintly from cycling as she sat on her usual stool, second from the end, where the bar curved toward the dark back wall. The Raven’s Nest was half full. A couple in suits spoke too loudly at a table by the window, their laughter spiky with drink. Someone fed coins into the ancient jukebox Silas refused to modernize, coaxing out a crackling guitar riff from a lifetime ago. Old maps and black-and-white photographs crowded every stretch of wall, frames overlapping, some hung crooked, others dead straight in a way that drew attention to their precision. Rory liked that about the place—that you could look up and find a photograph of a harbour you’d never been to, or a war march in grainy monochrome, and know that somewhere in the jumble there was a pattern Silas understood even if you never would. “Long night?” he asked now, sliding a small bowl of salted peanuts toward her. Silas Blackwood moved with his usual deliberate economy, the faint drag of his left leg only noticeable if you were looking for it. The lamps above the bar burnished the grey in his auburn hair, the matching beard trimmed close. His silver signet ring flashed each time he set a glass down. “Yu-Fei sent me to bloody Wimbledon,” Rory said. “Apparently no one in South London understands how postcodes work.” Silas’s hazel eyes creased at the corners. “You made it back alive. I’ll inform the press.” “You’ll have to start a press first,” she said, tipping a peanut into her mouth. Salt and cheap gin burned her tongue pleasantly. “Headline: Local Woman Bravely Delivers Mongolian Beef Across Two Bus Routes.” “You undersell the heroism,” Silas said. “Also, it was Szechuan chicken.” “Details.” He smiled—a quick, private thing—and turned to polish another glass that probably didn’t need it. Behind him, the bookshelf that hid the back room looked innocently solid, stuffed with titles no one ever touched. Once, he’d shown her how it opened, the hinge disguised as a mythology of explorers and spy memoirs. She pretended to forget the mechanism even though she hadn’t. She took another sip, feeling the cold spread through her chest. The bar hummed with low voices, the scrape of chairs, the dim roar of London outside. She liked this hour best, the edge between after-work and night-out, when people hadn’t quite decided what version of themselves they were going to be. Rory was considering whether she could justify another drink when the door opened and the room tilted. It wasn’t dramatic. No wind gusted in. The jukebox didn’t skip. The green neon glow stuttered in its usual unreliable pattern. But a draft of cooler air slid across the back of her neck, and a voice—quick apology to Silas for blocking the entrance, that familiar rise at the end of the sentence—hooked her like a wire. Rory didn’t turn at once. Her body went still around the glass, every muscle listening. The voice laughed at something Silas said, a laugh that used to crack open entire classrooms back in Cardiff. She could see it before she saw the person—the way Eva Ellis would throw her head back, black curls shaking, hand flung out as if keeping balance. Except the curls weren’t black anymore. And she hadn’t seen Eva in… what, five? Six years? “Can I get a table near the back?” the voice asked. Rory’s heart climbed roughly into her throat. She turned. The woman at the bar was, in broad strokes, the Eva she knew. Same sharp jaw, wide mouth, eyes the muddled green of glass bottles pulled out of the sea. But everything else had been… sharpened. Sanded. Turned deliberate. The hair was the first shock. No more anarchic curls. It was cut into a sleek bob, a dark honey brown that gleamed under the bar lights, tucked behind one ear to reveal a small gold hoop. The Eva she remembered had ink-stained fingers and ears full of mismatched studs; this woman’s only jewellery—aside from a watch that probably cost more than Rory’s scooter—was a thin gold band on her right hand. Her clothes were another story. Tailored navy coat open over a cream blouse, black cigarette trousers, heels that added necessary height but looked like they meant business. She carried a leather satchel instead of a canvas bag full of leaflets and law textbooks. When she laughed this time—as Silas pointed out the only free table—her teeth flashed white and straight. Something in Rory ached at the sight, like pressing on a healing bruise. Silas caught Rory’s eye as the woman followed him. An almost imperceptible lift of his eyebrows. You all right? Rory swallowed, the gin suddenly too sharp. “Eva?” she said, or tried to. It came out as a croak. The woman’s head snapped toward her, all that control scattering in an instant. “Rory?” For a second, neither of them moved. The sounds of the bar folded in on themselves, warping at the edges. Rory was acutely aware of the glass on the bartop under her fingers, of the damp ring it had left, of the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist that always seemed paler under fluorescent light, more noticeable when she didn’t want it to be. Then they were closing the space between them, like magnets finally allowed to do what they’d been trying to do all this time. They collided in a hug that was too hard to be polite but too brief to be full. “Jesus Christ,” Eva said, pulling back enough to look at her properly. “Look at you.” Rory snorted, the sound half nerves, half habit. “It’s been a while. You’ve, um… upgraded.” Eva’s mouth did that thing where one side kicked up, the old mischief trying to surface. “So have you. You’ve got London face now.” “What’s London face?” “That… thing.” Eva waved her hand around Rory’s eyes. “Like you’ve seen some shit but you’re too tired to talk about it.” “That’s just the bar lighting,” Rory said. “Sit. Or are you meeting someone?” “Just finished a thing at court,” Eva said, dropping her satchel onto the stool next to Rory’s and shrugging off her coat. Underneath, the cream blouse was… crisp, that was the only word. “Needed a drink somewhere that isn’t full of the people I’ve been arguing with all day.” Rory stared. “Court.” Eva rolled her eyes. “Yes, that place you were supposed to beat me to.” Silas set another gin and tonic down without being asked, the wedge of lime canted at an angle that said he’d been listening. He lingered a moment, his presence a calm weight between them. “On the house,” he said. “Old friends’ tax.” Eva smiled at him. “Thanks. I’m Eva, by the way.” “Silas.” He extended his right hand, signet ring catching the light. “Pleasure. I’ll leave you to it.” He moved away, limp barely a whisper on the polished floorboards. The maps watched from the walls. Eva picked up the drink, inhaled the scent, then took a long swallow that left a faint fog on the glass. “Fuck, that’s good,” she said. “Okay. Start talking. How have we… how is it… God, it’s really been—” “Six years,” Rory supplied. “I think. Last time I saw you, you were still bleaching your hair in my parents’ bathroom and telling my mum meat was murder.” Eva winced theatrically. “Right. And your dad threatened to call my mother and report me as a bad influence.” “He was right.” “He wasn’t,” Eva said, and something in the way she said it made Rory’s chest tight. “If anything, I should have been worse.” Rory looked down at her hands. There was a faint sheen of bike grease still clinging to her thumbnail. “So you did it,” she said, because the silence was starting to hiss. “You actually became a lawyer.” “Barrister,” Eva said automatically, then laughed. “Yeah. I did. Chambers in Temple, black robes, the whole costume. You would hate the shoes.” “I hate your shoes now.” “They’re Italian. Show some respect.” “You always said you’d go defence,” Rory said. “Stand up for the little guy. All that righteous fury.” “I remember,” Eva said quietly. Her gaze snagged on one of the old photographs above the bar—soldiers in greatcoats standing ankle-deep in snow. “I went CPS in the end. Prosecutor. Turns out I like ruining dodgy men’s days more than I like saving them.” “Different kind of righteous fury,” Rory said. “Something like that.” The past unspooled between them, not as a straight line but as a tangle of nights and mornings. Late library sessions at Cardiff University, highlighters bleeding neon over case law. Cheap beer in plastic cups. Eva standing in the rain outside Rory’s flat, shouting up at her window, “Leave him, Rory! He’s not worth a single one of your bruises!” Rory’s fingers tightened around her glass, thumb rubbing unconsciously over the small crescent scar on her wrist. A bicycle spill, age eleven. Eva’d been there for that too, dabbing antiseptic on it while Rory hissed. “And you?” Eva asked now. “You’re… living here?” “Upstairs,” Rory said. “Top floor. It’s—” She groped for a word that didn’t sound like settling. “—compact.” “And working…?” “Deliveries for Golden Empress,” she said. “Chinese place two streets over. You probably walked past it. Red lanterns, smells better than it looks.” Eva blinked. “You’re doing deliveries.” “Part-time,” Rory said, sharper than she intended. “I help out here sometimes. And Silas pays me obscene amounts to occasionally fix his booking system.” “Still the tech genius,” Eva said, softer. “Don’t say that, he’ll start asking me to install more cameras.” “God forbid the ex-spy wants surveillance,” Eva said dryly. Rory froze. “He told you?” “Rory.” Eva nudged her knee under the bar. “I watch the news. And I still have Wi-Fi. Besides, your ‘bar owner with a mysterious limp and aura of lethal competence’ is not exactly subtle.” Across the room, Silas chatted with the loud couple, his posture easy, ring glinting as he gestured. Even from here, Rory could see the way he scanned the room without seeming to. “Yeah, well,” she said. “He feeds me, and he doesn’t ask stupid questions.” “Unlike me,” Eva said. Rory opened her mouth, then shut it. The sour fizz of regret and gin burned her throat. They’d never talked about this, not properly. Not the last night in Cardiff, when Eva had found her on the kitchen floor, blood on her lip and a cracked plate in the sink. Not the frantic packing of a single suitcase, Eva on the phone booking a coach to London while Rory’s hands shook too hard to fold anything neatly. “I did call, you know,” Eva said suddenly. Rory frowned. “What?” “After you… left,” Eva said. “When you went to stay with me in London for a bit. And then you moved out. You stopped answering your phone. I called. So many times I started reciting your voicemail message in my sleep.” “You moved in with Sam,” Rory said. “You had exams. I was… I didn’t want to be in the way.” “You weren’t in the way,” Eva said. Her voice had that edge now, the one she used when a lecturer said something sexist. “You were—” “Breaking things,” Rory cut in. “I broke your favourite mug. Remember? The one with the badger on it.” “It was a fox.” “Whatever animal it was, you loved it. And I snapped the handle off by accident and started crying like… God, I don’t even know. And you looked at me like I was—” “Like you were in pain,” Eva said. “Because you were.” Rory’s laugh scraped her throat. “Yeah. Well. You were late for class and you left, and I kept… I kept breaking things. Phones. Promises. So I stopped picking up. Easier that way.” “Easier for who?” Eva asked, but it wasn’t an accusation. Not quite. Rory didn’t answer. She could feel Silas’s attention flick toward them, then away again. Giving space, but not too much. “Do you still see him?” Eva asked, and there it was—the ghost stepping fully into the room. Rory’s jaw tightened. Evan. Always a step behind his name, like a shadow on the pavement. “No,” she said. “Haven’t for years.” “Good.” “What about you?” Rory asked. It came out sounding more brittle than she wanted. “You ever run into him at your fancy barrister parties?” Eva snorted. “Barrister parties. God. No.” She hesitated. “He… there was an article a while back. Local paper in Cardiff. Drink-driving. Minor crash, no one hurt. Fine and a ban. That was… three years ago? Four? He looked older. Bloated. Like they’d pumped him full of all the things he used to throw at you.” Rory stared at the lime wedge in her glass until it went double. “You didn’t think to tell me.” “We weren’t talking,” Eva said. “You’d blocked me on everything.” “You could’ve emailed.” “I did,” Eva said. Her fingers slid along the condensation on her glass, tracing a meaningless shape. “Twice. The first one bounced. The second one… I never got a reply.” Rory remembered, too late, an email address she’d abandoned like a skin she couldn’t bear to shrug into again. She remembered opening a new inbox, all blank possibility, and not importing a single old contact. “I changed addresses,” she said. “I thought if I severed enough things, nothing could drag me back.” “Did it work?” Eva asked. Rory thought of the way her body still flinched when a man shouted on the street. Of how she avoided Cardiff on the weather map, like if she didn’t look at it, it would stop existing. “Not really,” she said. They drank. The jukebox warbled into a slower song, something with piano and a woman’s voice that seemed to come from the next room over, or the next decade. “Your parents?” Eva asked, after a while. The question was gentle, but it still landed like a small stone. Rory exhaled. “They’re… fine. I think. Mum texts me pictures of the cat. Dad sends articles about ‘interesting legal cases’ every few weeks, as if that will lure me back to the path of righteousness.” “And you don’t answer?” “Sometimes,” Rory said. “With emojis. It drives him mad. If I ever want revenge, I’ll just send him a paragraph of nothing but aubergines.” Eva laughed, but there was worry in it. “He still thinks you’re going back?” “He thinks this is a phase,” Rory said. “Like the time I went vegetarian for a month.” “You lasted three days,” Eva said automatically. “Five,” Rory corrected. “And it ended because you ate bacon in front of me on purpose.” “I considered it an act of mercy.” Eva toyed with her drink. “You were miserable. You’re miserable now when you talk about law. You always were.” “Yeah, well,” Rory said. “You weren’t supposed to actually go and prove him right, you know. You were the one meant to change the system. I was just there for comic relief.” “Fuck off,” Eva said, but without heat. “You were always the one who could see ten steps ahead. Exams, essays, fucking… arguments on the bus. You’d have made a terrifying lawyer.” “Terrifying because I’d set fire to the courtroom.” “Terrifying because you could twist a fact into a pretzel,” Eva said. “You still do, by the way. You’ve just turned it on yourself instead.” Rory looked up sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “It means,” Eva said slowly, “that you’ve built this whole narrative in your head where you’re the one who ran away and ruined everything. And I’m the one who did what I was supposed to. And your dad is disappointed, and your ex is a ghost, and I… I let you slip. And maybe all of that is true. A bit. For each of us. But also, Rory… you survived. That’s not ruin.” The word hung there. Survived. It had always felt too big for her, like a coat she was borrowing. She heard Silas’s voice in her memory, late one night when the bar was empty and the dishwasher hummed in the back. You’re here, he’d said simply, watching her wrap her hands around a mug of tea like it was an anchor. That’s not nothing. “You could have tried harder,” Rory said, quietly. “Back then. When I started disappearing. You were so… relentless about everything else. Climate marches. Union meetings. You stood outside the Dean’s office for three hours once. But with me…” Eva flinched. “I know.” “You yelled at me to leave him,” Rory said. “And when I finally did, you… went to class. You made notes. You fixed your hair in the mirror while I was trying not to look at my face. And then you… moved on. Got chambered. Got Italian shoes.” “That’s not fair,” Eva said, but she didn’t sound convinced. Rory stared at the scratched wood of the bar. “No. It probably isn’t. But that’s how it felt.” Silence swelled between them, thick with all the things they hadn’t said for six years. “I was scared,” Eva said at last, the words rough as if they’d been dragged up from somewhere deep. “You think I wasn’t? I’d never… I didn’t know how to… You were always the strong one, Rory. You were the one who leapt first. I followed. And then suddenly, you were broken, and I… I didn’t know what to do except keep going in the one direction I knew how.” “Forward,” Rory said. “Forward,” Eva echoed. “Because if I stopped and looked back properly, I was terrified I’d… I don’t know. Turn to salt. Or drop out. Or… move back to Cardiff and marry some idiot and never—” “Become this polished paragon of justice?” Rory supplied, crooked smile. Eva huffed. “Paragon. You should see me at half ten on a Friday night, crying over evidence bundles.” “I used to see you at half ten on a Friday night passed out on my sofa with crisp crumbs in your hair.” “I’ve upgraded to hummus.” “Of course you have.” They both smiled, small and real this time. The jukebox flicked to another track. Outside, the neon raven blinked and blinked, tireless. “I’m sorry,” Eva said. She’d turned her glass so the logo faced away from her, as if she didn’t want the words to have anything to hide behind. “I should have been there. More. Better. I should have… dragged you to therapy, or stayed home that day instead of going to that bloody seminar, or… anything other than assuming you’d bounce back like you always did.” Rory let the apology sit. She turned it over internally, like a stone in her palm. The old anger was there, but it had worn down at the edges over the years, weathered by other injuries. “I’m sorry too,” she said. The words surprised her a little, but once they’d started, they kept going. “For blocking you. For… erasing you with everything else. I thought if I cut away all the parts that hurt, I’d stop bleeding.” “How’s that working out?” Eva asked. “Mixed results.” They both laughed, quieter now. Silas drifted back over, his presence a kind of punctuation. “Another?” he asked, nodding at their nearly empty glasses. Eva glanced at Rory. “One more,” she said. “Then I have to catch a train before I turn into a pumpkin.” “You live out of town?” Rory asked. “Stoke Newington,” Eva said. “Apparently I’m the sort of person who says things like ‘we’ve got a great little coffee place round the corner.’” “We,” Rory repeated. “Is that a royal we or…?” Eva’s hand moved, almost unconsciously, to the gold band on her right hand. “Not married,” she said. “Yet. Civil partner. Her name’s Amina. She’s a disaster in the best way. You’d like her. She never finishes her cups of tea and then complains they’re cold.” “Sounds infuriating,” Rory said. Something inside loosened. “You’re… happy?” “Most days,” Eva said. “Some days I want to throw my wig at a judge. Some days I want to throw Amina at a judge. But yeah. I am.” “That’s… good,” Rory said. It was. It also hurt, in that odd distant way of watching someone you once knew intimately standing on a shore you’d never reach. “I’m glad.” Silas set fresh drinks down, his ring clinking softly against the glass. He lingered just long enough for Rory to feel the reassurance in it: I’m here. Then he moved away again, drawn by a raised hand at the far end of the bar. “You?” Eva asked, after they’d both sipped. “Are you…?” “Happy?” Rory finished for her. She considered. “Sometimes. Some days I deliver food and idiots shout at me and my hands go numb on the handlebars and my mum sends me another picture of the cat in a Christmas jumper in February and I think, what the hell am I doing.” “And other days?” Eva prompted. “Other days,” Rory said slowly, “I wake up and the light’s coming in at just the right angle through the crappy curtains, and I can hear the bar cleaning up from the night before, and I don’t… I don’t feel like I’m trapped in the wrong life. It’s not all there yet. But it’s… less not-there.” Eva’s eyes softened. “Progress.” “Don’t make it sound like a self-help book.” “Fine,” Eva said. “It’s a mess. But it’s your mess.” They sat with that. The weight of time between them no longer felt like a wall so much as a stretch of landscape they’d crossed separately. Different routes, same horizon. “I miss you,” Eva said abruptly. The words landed like a dropped glass, startling and fragile. Rory’s throat closed. “You can’t just… say that.” “Why not?” “Because…” Rory gestured helplessly. “Because then I have to decide what to do with it.” Eva’s smile was sad and sharp. “That’s always been your problem, Rory. You think you have to decide everything right now.” “Don’t I?” “No,” Eva said. “You can… not decide. You can let it be true that I miss you, and that I hurt you, and that you hurt me, and that we’re both different people now. You can text me sometime and then not text me for three months. You can… you know. Exist.” “Very poetic for someone who wears a wig to work,” Rory said, because if she didn’t make a joke she might actually do something terrifying, like cry. Eva laughed. “Occupational hazard. We weaponize language.” “You always did like weapons,” Rory said. Eva looked at her, really looked, then reached out and rested her hand briefly over Rory’s, fingers cold from the glass, ring digging lightly into her skin. “Take my number,” she said. “In case you ever need a very expensive argument in your favour.” Rory hesitated only a second before pulling her phone from her pocket. The screen lit her wrist, the pale crescent scar stark for a moment, then washed out as she angled it away. She typed in the digits as Eva recited them, muscle memory stirring in her fingers. Once, they’d known each other’s numbers by heart, could dial them in the dark. This felt like learning a foreign language with a familiar accent. “Got you,” Rory said, saving it under ‘Eva – barrister menace’. Eva peered over and snorted. “Accurate.” “Don’t expect prompt replies,” Rory added. “I’m shit at texting.” “Some things never change,” Eva said. “I’ll take what I can get.” They finished their drinks. Outside, a siren wailed briefly, then ran out of breath. The neon raven flickered, threatening to give up, then steadied. Eva glanced at her watch. “I really do have to go,” she said. “If I miss this train, I’ll be explaining to a magistrate tomorrow why I’m yawning in his face.” “Blame your tragic reunion with your long-lost friend,” Rory suggested. “Absolutely,” Eva said, standing and shrugging into her coat. Up close, Rory could smell her perfume—sharp citrus over something warmer. Different from the cheap body spray of their uni days, but underneath, something recognisable. “It plays well in court.” They hovered by the bar, that awkward half-second where you had to decide between a casual goodbye and something else. Eva solved it by pulling Rory into another hug, tighter this time, less startled. For a moment, Rory let herself sink into it. The shape of Eva’s shoulder under the coat. The press of her cheek against her hair. The murmur of the bar around them like a tide. “Don’t disappear again,” Eva murmured into her ear. “I’ll try,” Rory said, the word feeling like both a promise and a loophole. Eva pulled back, her eyes bright but dry. “Goodnight, Rory.” “Goodnight, Eva.” She watched her weave through the tables, call a thanks to Silas, and push the door open. Cool air spilled in; the neon raven painted her silhouette green for a heartbeat before the door shut behind her, leaving only her reflection fading in the glass. Rory sat back down slowly. Her glass was empty, a few ice cubes melting into a shallow puddle. Silas wandered over, the bar quieter now. “Old friend?” he asked, as if the answer weren’t already written all over her face. “Something like that,” Rory said. He nodded. “You look… lighter.” “Do I?” She lifted her hands, half expecting something to float away. The scar on her wrist caught the light, soft and domestic. Childhood, not catastrophe. “Feels more like… heavier, but in a way I can actually feel. If that makes sense.” “Sometimes weight keeps you on the ground,” Silas said. “Not always a bad thing.” She rolled the empty glass between her palms. On the back wall, a black-and-white photograph showed two women in coats leaning against each other on a pier, laughing at something just out of frame, sea wild behind them. Rory looked at it until the shapes blurred. Then she pulled her phone out again. Eva’s new number sat there, small and absurd on the screen. She didn’t text. Not yet. She just let it exist. Outside, the neon raven blinked and blinked, tireless witness to people coming and going, to those who stayed and those who left and those who, sometimes, found their way back through the door.