Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMR1VDTQ3N5QFC7BKN5B1GJ

The rain had been falling for three days straight, the kind of relentless London downpour that seeped into bones and brickwork alike. Aurora Carter shook her umbrella dry on the pavement outside The Raven's Nest, watched the distinctive green neon sign flicker twice against the grey evening, and pushed through the heavy wooden door. She shouldn't have come tonight. The delivery shift had run long, her bike chain had slipped twice on wet cobblestones, and the only thing she wanted was the kettle in her flat and the borrowed paperback she'd been meaning to finish. But the radiator above her rooms had started making that knocking sound again—the one Silas swore he'd fixed—and the prospect of a warm corner booth and a meal she didn't have to cook had won out over common sense. The bar was nearly empty. Tuesday nights in November weren't exactly peak hours, even for a place as well-loved as the Nest. Old Harold sat in his usual spot at the far end of the bar, nursing a pint of bitter and speaking softly to no one in particular. A young couple occupied one of the booths near the window, their heads bent together in that intimate way that made Rory look away. The walls watched her with their familiar procession of yellowed maps and black-and-white photographs—cities that no longer existed, borders that had been redrawn, faces caught in the amber of someone else's memory. Silas wasn't behind the bar. That was the first wrong note in an otherwise familiar tune. His barman, a quiet Pole named Tomasz who spoke little and listened well, nodded at her from behind the taps. "Kitchen's open another hour," he said. "Yu-Fei sent over the leftover dumplings." "Perfect." She settled onto a stool, unzipped her jacket, and felt the familiar ache in her shoulders begin to unspool. The scar on her left wrist pressed against the worn wood of the bar—a small crescent moon of raised tissue she never thought about anymore, except when she did. The door swung open behind her, bringing with it a gust of wet air and the sound of a woman's laughter—bright and sharp, cutting through the low murmur of the bar like a blade. Rory turned on her stool. She shouldn't have recognized her. Eight years will do that—blur the edges of a face, soften the particular set of a jaw, turn someone who once occupied every corner of your mind into a stranger with familiar eyes. But the laugh was the same. That was the thing about laughs. They never changed. Evangeline Ashford stood in the doorway, shaking rain from a coat that probably cost more than three months of rent on Rory's flat. Her auburn hair was longer than it had been at twenty-two, swept up in an effortless chignon that spoke of salons and time and someone else's hands arranging it. But her eyes—grey-green and sharp as ever—found Rory across the room with the same unerring accuracy that had once spotted her hiding in the library during lunch period. The smile that crossed Eva's face was a complicated thing. Surprise, yes. But something else underneath. Something that looked almost like guilt. "Well," Eva said, crossing the space between them with the confident stride of a woman who had never once doubted her right to occupy any room she entered. "Look who the cat dragged in." Rory didn't stand. Couldn't, suddenly, remember how her legs worked. "Eva." They had been seventeen the last time they'd spoken—really spoken. Not the stilted exchange of pleasantries at some mutual acquaintance's wedding, not the careful dance of Facebook messages that went unanswered for months at a stretch. Seventeen, and Eva had been crying in the girls' toilets because some boy had said something cutting, and Rory had held her hair back and told her she was worth ten of him, fifty of him, and Eva had laughed through her tears and said, "Promise we'll never let a boy make us feel like this. Promise, Rory. Cross your heart." She had crossed her heart. She had meant it. Eva signaled to Tomasz for two glasses of white wine—a presumption, that, assuming Rory would want to stay, would want to talk. But then, Eva had always been like that. A force of nature. You didn't negotiate with a hurricane; you just hoped it passed you by. "You look good," Eva said, sliding onto the stool beside her. Up close, the changes were more apparent. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes. The careful way she held her shoulders, as though bracing against some invisible weight. The ring on her finger—a diamond solitaire that caught the low light and threw it back in fractured rainbows. "You're getting married," Rory said. Not a question. "Next spring. Jonathan Ashworth—his family has that estate in Gloucestershire. You probably haven't heard of them." The dismissal was casual, automatic. The old Eva would have been mortified to hear that tone in her own voice. The new Eva didn't seem to notice it at all. "He's terribly kind. Terribly dull, too, but I've learned that dull has its virtues." "Have you?" Eva's smile flickered. "Don't do that, Rory. Don't look at me like you're seeing something worth mourning." "I'm not—" But she was. They both knew it. The wine arrived, chilled and pale as spring water. Eva wrapped her fingers around the stem of her glass with the practiced ease of someone who had learned, at some point, which fork to use and how to make small talk at dinners where the courses just kept coming. Rory thought of the girl who had once climbed a tree in Kensington Gardens in a dress that cost more than her mother's monthly salary, who had scraped both knees and laughed until she cried. "I heard you left Cardiff," Eva said. "London suits you, I think. You always did belong somewhere with more... grit." "Is that what you tell yourself? That London is gritty and you made the sensible choice?" The words came out sharper than she'd intended. Eva flinched—a small motion, quickly controlled. "I made the only choice I could." Eva's voice had lost its practiced lightness. Underneath was something raw, something that sounded almost like the girl Rory had known. "You weren't there, Rory. After you left, after your father's firm collapsed and your mother got sick, you weren't there. You didn't see what it did to them—to everyone. Dad's practice was audited. Mum lost her teaching position over some accusation that was never proven but followed her anyway. We lost everything. The house, the cars, the friends who turned out not to be friends at all." Rory's chest tightened. "I didn't know." "No, you wouldn't. You were already gone." Eva took a long drink of her wine. "I did what I had to do. I made myself useful to people who could help my family. I became the kind of woman who gets invited to the right parties, who says the right things, who marries the right man. And it worked. Mum and Dad are in a lovely flat in Bath now. Dad consults. Mum gardens. They're happy." "Are you?" The question hung between them. Eva opened her mouth—Rory could see the ready answer forming, the perfect response she'd surely given a hundred times before. But something shifted in her expression. The mask cracked, just for a moment, and beneath it was a grief so profound that Rory felt it in her own chest like a physical blow. "I don't know," Eva whispered. "I don't know anymore." The admission seemed to cost her something vital. She looked down at her hands—the manicured nails, the expensive ring, the hands of a stranger who wore her old friend's face. "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night," Eva continued, her voice barely audible above the rain against the windows, "and I can't remember who I was before I became someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's obligation. I can't remember what I used to dream about. I can't remember what used to make me laugh until my stomach hurt. And I think, 'This is what dying feels like. Not all at once, but in pieces. Little pieces, falling away one by one until there's nothing left but the shape of who you used to be.'" Rory reached across the space between them and took Eva's hand. The gesture was awkward—she wasn't demonstrative by nature, never had been—but it was the only thing she knew to offer. Eva's fingers were cold. They gripped hers like a lifeline. "I used to imagine what our lives would be like," Rory said quietly. "When we were sixteen, seventeen. I thought we'd both end up in London, sharing a flat, working jobs we hated and writing novels on weekends." "You were always the writer, not me." Eva's laugh was wet, fragile. "I was just the one who talked too much." "You were the one who made everything an adventure." "God." Eva pressed her free hand to her eyes. "I was, wasn't I? When did I stop?" "I don't know. When did you start being afraid?" The question landed like a stone in still water. Eva's hand trembled in hers. "I'm not afraid," she said. But they both heard the lie. Silence stretched between them—not comfortable, not entirely strained, but weighted with all the years and all the words that had gone unsaid. Tomasz polished glasses at the other end of the bar, politely ignoring them. The young couple had left at some point, and old Harold had nodded off in his corner. The Raven's Nest felt smaller than it had when Rory walked in, as though the walls had drawn closer to hold them both in this moment. "What about you?" Eva asked finally, straightening and wiping carefully at her eyes. The mask was sliding back into place, but imperfectly now—Rory could see the seams. "Are you happy? Are you doing what you dreamed of?" Rory thought of the delivery bike, the flat above the bar, the careful distance she kept between herself and anyone who might want more than she could give. She thought of Evan, and the way her wrists still ached sometimes when it rained. "I'm alive," she said. "I'm making my own choices. I'm not who I thought I'd be at twenty-five, but I'm not who anyone else wanted me to be either. That has to count for something." "It counts for everything." Eva's voice was fierce, sudden. "Don't you see? That's the one thing I couldn't do. I couldn't figure out how to be myself when being myself wasn't enough for anyone." "You were always enough for me." Eva's eyes met hers—grey-green and bright with unshed tears, the same eyes that had once looked at her across a crowded classroom and decided, for reasons Rory had never understood, that she was worth knowing. "I should go," Eva said, but she didn't move. Her hand was still warm in Rory's. "Yes. You probably should." They stood together, a little unsteadily. Eva left money on the bar for wine she'd barely touched. At the door, she paused and turned back. "I didn't come here looking for you," she said. "I was meeting a friend—they cancelled at the last minute. I only came in because of the green sign. I have a memory, from years ago, of a bar with a green sign. Somewhere we went together, maybe. I can't quite place it." "It wasn't this one," Rory said. "We were never here together." "No." Eva smiled, and for just a moment, she looked exactly like the girl who had climbed a tree in Kensington Gardens. "No, I suppose we weren't. But perhaps we should have been." She pushed through the door and was gone, swallowed by the rainy London night. Rory stood very still for a long time, looking at the empty space where her oldest friend had been. Then she sat back down, finished the wine that had gone warm in her absence, and waited for something that might have been grief or might have been relief to loosen its grip on her chest. Behind the bar, Tomasz quietly refilled her glass without being asked.