Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQVQZRWN4E9HPXDK50FC4W

The Raven's Nest was quieter than usual for a Thursday. Rory stood behind the bar with a damp cloth in one hand and a pint glass in the other, polishing it in slow circles the way Silas had shown her—always clockwise, he'd said, as if the direction mattered, as if entropy could be managed with a simple change of wrist. She'd laughed at him for it the first time. Now she did it without thinking, the muscle memory of borrowed habits. Silas was in the back somewhere, probably behind the bookshelf in that room he thought she didn't know about. She knew about it. She'd known since the second week, when she'd come downstairs at two in the morning for water and heard voices through the wall—Silas and someone speaking rapid Czech. She never asked. He never told. It was the cleanest arrangement she'd ever had with another human being. The green neon sign threw its sick glow through the window onto the wet pavement outside, and beyond it, Soho churned along in its usual state of damp, loud indifference. Rory set the glass down and reached for another. The only customers left were a couple in the far booth who hadn't stopped touching each other's faces for the past forty minutes and a man at the end of the bar nursing a whiskey he hadn't ordered yet—he'd simply pointed at the Jameson and held up one finger, and Rory had poured without a word. She appreciated a man who didn't narrate his drink order. The door opened. Cold air first, then the sound of rain, then a woman. She was tall, or at least taller than Rory remembered. Her hair was different—cropped short and bleached to a color that wasn't quite blonde and wasn't quite anything, like straw left in the sun too long. She wore a camel coat that looked expensive and shoes that confirmed it. She paused just inside the doorway, scanning the room the way people do when they're looking for someone specific or when they're hoping no one specific is there. Her gaze landed on Rory. Neither of them moved for a beat. Then two. "Christ," the woman said. "Eva," Rory said. Eva Marsh stood dripping on the threshold of Silas' bar like something the Thames had coughed up and dressed in Burberry. She looked like money now—not old money, not the kind that smells like libraries and guilt, but the sharp, deliberate kind. The kind you earn or marry. Her face was thinner. Her cheekbones had angles that Rory didn't recognize, and there was something around her eyes—not tiredness exactly, but a kind of permanent vigilance. Like she was always calculating the distance to the nearest exit. "You're behind a bar," Eva said, as if she needed to state this aloud to believe it. "And you're in front of one. Some things work out." Rory set the cloth down. Her hands were steady. She was proud of that. "What are you drinking?" Eva crossed the room in measured steps, her heels clicking against the old wood floor. She sat on the stool directly in front of Rory and placed both hands flat on the bar, and Rory noticed that her nails were perfect—short, painted a matte nude, not a single chip. The Eva she remembered had bitten her nails down to nothing. Had worried them raw during exam season and laughed about it after, holding up her ruined fingers like war trophies. "Gin and tonic. Whatever you have." "We have Hendrick's, Tanqueray, or Silas' personal supply, which he'll kill me for touching." "Hendrick's." Rory poured. She sliced a cucumber with the small knife kept beneath the register, laid it across the rim, and slid the glass forward. Eva watched all of this with an expression Rory couldn't quite read. Fascination, maybe. Or pity. The two had always looked similar on Eva's face. "It's been four years," Eva said. "Three and a half." "You're counting." "I'm precise. There's a difference." Eva picked up the glass and drank. Not a sip—a proper drink, the kind that said the evening had been long before she'd walked through the door. When she set it down, her lipstick left a crescent on the rim, and Rory thought absurdly of the scar on her own left wrist, its crescent shape, the way marks have a way of following you. "You look good," Eva said. "You look different." Eva's mouth twitched. "That's not the same thing, is it?" "No. But it's what I've got." A silence opened between them—not hostile, not comfortable. Structural. The kind of silence that holds up everything that might otherwise collapse if either of them started talking too honestly. Rory wiped the bar in front of her. Clockwise. "I came looking for you," Eva said. "Not here. I mean, I didn't know you were here. I've been asking around. Your mum said London. She didn't have an address." "I didn't give her one." Eva absorbed that without flinching, which was another difference. The old Eva would have pushed. Would have said *Rory, that's awful* or *She's your mother* or any of the other things people say when they have mothers who don't require managing. "I went to four bars before this one," Eva continued. "It was the green sign. I don't know. Something about it. I just walked in." "Lucky you." "Is it?" Rory studied her. Under the dim light, surrounded by Silas' old maps and his gallery of black-and-white photographs—strangers' faces from strangers' decades—Eva looked almost like an exhibit herself. Something preserved under glass. Something you couldn't quite touch. "You left, Eva. I called you for weeks after—after everything with Evan. You're the one who told me to come to London in the first place, and then you just—" Rory stopped. She pressed her thumb against the crescent scar, the way she always did when something tried to rise in her chest. "You disappeared." Eva turned the gin glass slowly on the bar. Clockwise, Rory noticed, and hated herself for noticing. "I know," Eva said. "That's it? You know?" "What do you want me to say?" "I want you to say why." Eva looked up. In the low amber light, her eyes were darker than Rory remembered—or maybe they'd always been that dark and she'd just never paid attention, the way you never pay attention to the precise color of things you see every day. "I got scared," Eva said. "Not of you. Of what was happening to you. Of what he was doing to you. I told you to come to London because I thought it would fix things, and then I realized—" She stopped. She pressed her lips together and Rory saw, for the first time, a crack in the expensive veneer. A fracture running through the foundation. "I realized I couldn't fix it. I couldn't fix you. And if I stayed close, I'd have to watch, and I wasn't—I wasn't strong enough for that." The words sat on the bar between them like a spilled drink nobody wanted to clean up. "You think I needed fixing," Rory said quietly. "I think you were breaking. And I think I was too selfish to hold the pieces." From somewhere behind the bar, Rory heard the creak of the bookshelf and then Silas' uneven footsteps—the slight limp that came and went depending on the weather, worse in the damp, which meant worse always in London. He appeared in the doorway to the back hall, hazel eyes taking in the scene with the practiced sweep of a man who'd spent decades reading rooms for a living. His silver signet ring caught the light as he gripped the doorframe. He looked at Rory. She gave him the smallest shake of her head—*I'm fine*—and he lingered one beat longer than necessary before retreating. The bookshelf didn't creak again. He'd gone upstairs instead. Giving her space, but staying close. That was Silas. That was the whole arrangement. "Who's that?" Eva asked. "My landlord. Sort of. It's complicated." "Everything with you is complicated." "Everything with everyone is complicated, Eva. You just got better at pretending otherwise." Eva flinched. There it was—the reaction Rory hadn't known she was hunting for. The proof that somewhere beneath the expensive coat and the precision-cut hair and whatever life had reshaped her into, the old Eva still existed. The one who'd sat on Rory's dorm room floor at Cardiff, sharing a stolen bottle of wine and declaring that they'd never become the kind of people who stopped telling each other the truth. "I got married," Eva said. "I heard." "His name is Graham. He works in finance. He's—he's very kind." "You say that like kindness is a compromise." Eva's jaw tightened. "Maybe it is. Maybe after a while, everything is." Rory poured herself a glass of water from the tap and drank it, buying time. She thought about the flat upstairs—its thin walls, its one window that looked out onto absolutely nothing, the mattress on the floor because she hadn't gotten around to buying a frame. She thought about Yu-Fei's delivery bike and the routes she'd memorized through Soho's side streets, the warm containers strapped to her back, the smell of Szechuan peppercorn that never quite washed out of her jacket. She thought about how small a life could become and still be yours. Still be chosen. "I'm not angry," Rory said, and it was almost true. "I was. For a long time. But anger takes a lot of energy, and I've been using mine for other things." "Like pouring drinks in Soho?" "Like surviving. Which is less glamorous than whatever you've been doing, but it's honest. And it's mine." Eva's eyes went glassy. She blinked hard, twice, and the shine disappeared—pushed down, managed, controlled. Another new skill. The old Eva had cried openly, spectacularly, the way some people sneeze. Full commitment. "I should have called," Eva said. "Yes." "I should have come." "Yes." "Can you forgive me?" Rory looked at her—really looked, the way she hadn't let herself do since Eva sat down. She looked at the short bleached hair and the thin face and the expensive coat and the perfect nails that didn't get bitten anymore. She looked at the woman her best friend had become, and she tried to find the girl who'd once dragged her out of a house party at two a.m. because she'd noticed that Rory's smile had stopped reaching her eyes. The girl who'd said *come to London* like it was a magic spell. "I don't know," Rory said. "But you can stay and finish your drink. And we can start there." Eva nodded. She wrapped both hands around her glass the way she used to wrap them around mugs of tea in their shared kitchen in Cardiff—both palms, fingers interlocked, like she was holding something alive. Outside, the rain picked up. The green neon buzzed and flickered once, then steadied. Rory picked up her cloth and began polishing the next glass. Clockwise. Always clockwise. Neither of them spoke for a while, and the silence changed. Not comfortable yet. Not structural. Something in between. Something that had room in it—room for what had been said and what hadn't, for the years that had passed and the years that might still come. The kind of silence that doesn't need to be filled because it's already full. The couple in the back booth finally stopped touching each other's faces and asked for the bill. The man at the end of the bar pointed at the Jameson again and held up one finger. Rory poured. Eva watched her work, and Rory let her.