AI The rain worked down the window in thin crooked lines, dragging the street’s neon into slow green smears. Inside the Raven’s Nest the air felt close and warm, full of wet wool, spilled beer and the faint ghost of lemon from a rag that had seen better days.
Aurora rolled her wrist and watched the pint glass catch the low light as it filled. The pump handle stuck, as always, halfway through the pull. Her fingers dug in. Foam rose, settled. Her small crescent scar flashed pale against her brown skin, then vanished behind suds and movement.
“Careful with that, Carter. Murphy in the corner believes head on a Guinness is an act of God. You mess that up, we’ll have an inquest.”
Silas leaned on the end of the bar, weight off his bad leg, shoulders loose in a linen shirt that had once been white. The silver ring on his finger knocked the counter in a steady beat, the impatient metronome he never noticed.
Aurora slid the pint toward him.
“Then you pour it. You’re the one with the priest voice.”
“I retired from that calling, remember.”
He swept the glass up and limped away, hazel eyes already scanning the room, antennae everywhere even after all these years. Old maps watched him from the walls, oceans fading to grey, borders erased and redrawn in biro. The bar hummed with half-heard conversations, the clink of ice in short glasses, the occasional bark of laughter. A Tuesday night that had nowhere better to be.
The door opened under the green neon sign with a push that brought the wind in. Cold air licked along Aurora’s bare forearms. She looked up with the reflex of someone who watched faces for trouble, for tips, for stories.
For a breath she saw only the outline—the umbrella tucked under an arm, the dark coat, the sharp edges of someone who had spent years in good shoes on hard floors.
Then the woman stepped into the run of yellow light from the bar, and the years fell away with a dull, heavy clatter.
“Rory?”
The voice hit first. Not the word. The cadence under it. Cardiff wrapped around two syllables, dragged out at the end like a question that didn’t want an answer.
Aurora’s hand stopped halfway to the dish rack. Water beaded on the glass, rolled over her knuckles.
“Eva.”
It left her mouth before she looked like she meant to speak .
The woman’s hair had changed. It used to hang in a rough tangle down her back, dyed every colour Boots stocked. Now it sat in a sharp bob that brushed her jaw, dark and straight and expensive. A navy suit hugged her frame; pale shirt, small gold studs in her ears where once there had been rings and chains and the odd safety pin. Same brown eyes, though. Same faint scar along the chin from the time she’d tried to jump the river by the old train tracks and met the rocks instead.
Eva laughed under her breath, a short disbelieving thing.
“You’re… here. You work here?”
Aurora flicked the tap off. Her shoulders loosened, only because she made them.
“Rent doesn’t pay itself. What are you doing in Soho?”
“Work thing. Conference. I walked until the rain got smug and this neon bullied me inside.”
Her gaze moved around the bar. The maps. The black-and-white faces that stared out from their frames. The low ceiling, the way every table had its own island of shadow.
“Didn’t peg you for… this place.”
“People never do.”
Aurora rubbed her hands on a towel and stepped along the bar to the space right in front of her. She leaned in a little, elbows just short of the wood. The lamp above them swung, casting her face in soft gold, then shadow, then gold again.
“So. You want to stand in the doorway and narrate my career choices, or are you drinking?”
Eva breathed out through her nose and set the umbrella against the bar stool. She perched on it like someone who doubted the furniture’s loyalty.
“Red wine. Something that won’t strip my throat.”
“You used to drink cider that tasted like floor cleaner.”
“Yeah, but I used to cut my own fringe and write poetry on bus tickets.”
Aurora took a bottle down from the rack and held it up, checking the label out of habit more than need. Her fingers worked the cork; she let the pop sink into the wider murmur of the room.
“Still write?” She poured the wine, careful at the edge.
Eva took the glass. Her fingers looked slimmer than Aurora remembered, nails neat, pale crescent moons instead of chipped black polish.
“Briefs. Contracts. Pleadings. Counts as writing in the technical sense. You?”
“Delivery receipts. Shopping lists. The odd strongly worded text to my landlord.”
“You always had a better line in angry letters.”
“We play to our strengths.”
Eva’s mouth twitched. The laugh this time came easier, but it ran into something at the back of her throat and stopped.
Aurora pushed a small bowl of mixed nuts toward her enemy of dental work.
“On the house. Silas thinks people stay longer if they can chew.”
“Silas?”
Aurora jerked her chin toward the far side of the bar. Silas stood by table three, one hand on the back of a chair, listening to an old woman in a leopard-print coat hold court about something that made his shoulders shake in quiet amusement.
“Owner. Landlord. Local cryptid. Don’t let the limp fool you; he sees everything.”
Eva watched him for a second.
“Is he the reason you’re in London?”
“No. You are.”
The words dropped between them, heavy as a coin on a quiet morning.
Eva’s fingers tightened around the stem of the glass. A flush crawled up her neck, under the collar of her shirt.
“That was… years ago.”
“Time checks out.”
“You actually came, then. After. I mean, I knew you came to London, but I thought—”
“You thought I ignored you, like always.”
“That’s not what I—”
Her jaw flexed. She took a breath, started again.
“I thought you’d stay with him. You always went back.”
The bar around them carried on, oblivious. Someone played with the jukebox in the corner, coaxed an old soul song out of its tired speakers. The low bass line threaded through the chatter.
Aurora reached for another glass, dried it though it already shone.
“Evan’s not a hobby I kept.”
“I heard,” Eva murmured into her wine.
“How?”
“Cardiff is small. Your mum saw mine at Tesco. Word travels faster than the six bus.”
Aurora pictured the fluorescent aisles, her mother’s hands on a trolley handle, voice dropping when it reached her name. A life she’d walked out of with a single weekend bag and a bruise constellation on her ribs.
“What did she say?” Her voice hardly rose above the music.
“That you’d left him. That you’d gone to London. That you were—” Eva’s eyes flicked to the scar on Aurora’s wrist, to the bar, the ceiling, the city beyond the door. “—finding yourself.”
Aurora snorted, a rough sound.
“Do I look like I’ve found myself?”
Eva took her in. The straight black hair tucked behind one ear. The oversized band tee under a men’s shirt that had lost two buttons. The quiet way she held herself.
“You look less… breakable.”
Aurora’s hand stopped moving.
“Less breakable than what?”
“Than the last time I saw you. On the steps outside the law building. Crying so hard you couldn’t breathe, swearing you’d never go back to him again.”
“Yet I did.”
“Yeah.”
Eva took a slow drink. The pause swelled, filled with rain on glass and a burst of laughter from the back table.
Aurora cleared a few empty glasses nearby, stacking them, giving her hands a task.
“You vanished,” she said, her tone lighter than the words. “Phone off. House empty. Even your ratty Converse were gone. One day you were banging on my door at three in the morning, the next—”
“I left for London.” Eva twisted the base of her glass on a damp ring on the wood. “Got the offer. Pupillage at that chambers near Temple. The one we used to joke we’d both end up in.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You were back with him.”
Aurora’s eyes narrowed .
“So that meant I stopped existing?”
“It meant… I’d said everything I knew to say. Every version of ‘leave him’ I could. You looked through me. Like I was background noise.”
Aurora set the stack of glasses down on a rubber mat. They clinked against each other, as if agreeing with Eva .
“Last time we spoke,” Eva went on, words gaining a blunt edge now they’d started, “you told me to mind my own business. That I was jealous because someone loved you enough to fight for you.”
The memory struck like the flash of a camera—Eva in Aurora’s tiny Cardiff kitchen, arms folded over her ‘Repeal’ T-shirt, mascara smeared from an earlier tear; Aurora raw and exhausted, fingers digging into the counter, listening, not listening.
“I also threw the mug you got me for my seventeenth birthday,” Aurora muttered. “The one with the cartoon otter.”
“You missed. Hit the wall.”
“You kept a running commentary even then.”
“Occupational hazard.”
Their eyes met over the bar, two points in a line stretched thin.
“I thought,” Eva said, lower now, “if I stayed, I’d just watch you… disappear. So I left first. Coward’s move.”
Aurora leaned on her hands, the wood warm under her palms.
“Why didn’t you call? After you heard I left him?”
“I did. Number didn’t work. I messaged you on everything. Even that stupid email you set up for us to send each other secret poems.”
Aurora blinked. “You remember the password?”
“Of course. ‘PanicAtTheTesco23’ is seared into my brain.”
A reluctant smile pulled at Aurora’s mouth.
“Forgot about that.”
“You disappeared, Rory. You fell off the edge of the map. I thought… I thought he’d killed you.”
She said it flat, no drama, and the words sat on the bar like another glass between them.
Silas drifted closer, the way he always did when voices dipped and shoulders tensed. He reached for a bottle from the shelf above Aurora’s head, his limp more pronounced in the narrow space.
“Everything all right here?” His gaze moved from Aurora to Eva and back, picking up threads, assessing quietly.
Eva straightened.
“Fine. Just catching up on some ancient history.”
Silas’s eyes warmed a fraction. “Ancient history has the sharpest teeth.”
“A bottle of still water?” Aurora tilted her head at him.
“For table five. Unless this reunion needs it more.”
“We’ll cope.”
He nodded and eased away, ring tapping a small coded rhythm on the bar as he passed.
Eva watched him go.
“Your landlord keeps an eye.”
“He likes his furniture intact. Fights are bad for business.”
“You punching me over unpaid poetry royalties would draw a crowd.”
Aurora’s mouth twitched.
“No royalties. We peaked at seventeen.”
They fell quiet again. Outside, a siren wailed past, distant and uninterested.
Eva traced the condensation on her glass with one finger.
“I walked in here for shelter and a drink,” she said, eyes fixed on the groove her nail made in the water. “Didn’t expect to walk into… this.”
“Same.”
“How long have you… been here?” Her hand made a small vague circle around the bar, around Aurora.
“Couple of years. Silas rented me the room upstairs when I washed up from Goldhawk Road with nowhere cheaper to go. Got me shifts when he realised I could carry four plates without dropping them.”
“And law? The plan? The grand Carter crusade against injustice?”
Aurora’s laugh came out thin.
“I left my last seminar halfway through a lecture on equity. Took the train that night. Never went back.”
“You could’ve come to me. I had space. Sofa, at least.”
“You were a proper grown-up barrister. Wigs and Latin. I was a mess with a bin bag of clothes. Didn’t seem fair to drop that on your doorstep.”
Eva looked up, something like anger and hurt flaring together.
“That wasn’t your call.”
“You lived in some tiny room in Zone One. I saw your pictures. You barely fit a kettle.”
“You still looked at my pictures.”
“Occasionally. When I hated myself more than usual.”
Eva let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for years .
“You pushed me away, then punished me for being away. You realise how that works out for me?”
Aurora met her stare.
“You’re the one who left.”
“You’re the one who made leaving feel like the only option.”
They held that for a long moment, two hands on opposite ends of the same rope.
Someone at the end of the bar clicked fingers for attention. Aurora lifted a hand without looking away from Eva.
“Give me a minute.”
The customer muttered under his breath. Another barman swung in, took the order, broke the minor tension .
“You know I came to your house,” Eva said. “After I heard you’d gone. I stood outside like an idiot with a plastic bag of cheap wine and crisps. Your dad opened the door. He looked at me like I was a ghost from his worst dream.”
Aurora’s throat worked.
“He told me you were gone. That you’d left for London with no forwarding address. Your mum shouted something from the kitchen about you needing ‘space’.”
“That sounds like her.”
“I asked if they wanted my number. In case you… wanted it. Your dad said he didn’t think you did.”
Heat crawled up Aurora’s chest, slow and suffocating.
“He what?”
“He said you needed to do this on your own. That you had to make your own mistakes. That they were… standing back.” Eva’s fingers tightened on the glass. “He shut the door very gently . That was the worst part. No slam. Just this soft little click, like he was closing a cupboard.”
Aurora swallowed against the knot in her throat.
“I didn’t know.”
“I figured.”
The room swayed in the corner of her vision. She felt the bar under her hands, solid and worn and real.
“I wanted to call you.” The words surprised even her as they left her mouth. “Every day on that first week. I walked past phone boxes and thought, ‘Eva would laugh at this one, the handset’s held together with blue tape.’ I drafted messages in my head. I rehearsed apologies in the shower.”
“What stopped you?”
“You telling me I was killing you by staying with him.” Her voice stayed level. “You were right. That hurt worse than the rest. I thought if I called, you’d pick up and hang up the second you heard my voice.”
“You never gave me the chance.”
“You never gave me a forwarding address.”
Eva smiled without humour.
“So we’re both idiots.”
“Certified.”
They both exhaled, something loosening and not quite settling .
Eva’s gaze drifted over Aurora’s face, pausing at old familiar points, taking in new lines.
“You really do look different,” she murmured.
“Older?”
“Less… open. You used to walk into rooms like you owned them. Now you move like you’re casing the exits.”
“London’ll do that.”
“Evan did that.”
Aurora didn’t flinch, which felt like its own small win .
“I’m still here.”
“I’m glad,” Eva breathed. “You have no idea.”
Aurora glanced at the clock above the spirits, then back at her.
“You got… someone waiting at the hotel? Partner, boss, cat?”
“Boss is probably checking his emails in a bathrobe somewhere. No partner. No cat. My houseplants live on the edge with my schedule.”
“So you walked into a random bar on a Tuesday night and found your ghost.”
Eva sipped the last of her wine, the glass tilted.
“Looks that way.”
Aurora reached for the bottle again.
“Another?”
Eva hesitated, then pushed the glass forward.
“Yeah. Why not meet my bad decisions head-on.”
Aurora poured, the wine catching the light, deep red and steady.
“On the house,” she said.
“You’ll get in trouble with Silas.”
“He owes me.”
“For?”
“Letting him crash my past into his Tuesday shift.”
Eva’s mouth curled.
“He runs a good nest.”
“He does.”
Aurora slid the full glass back across the bar, fingers brushing Eva’s for a fraction of a second. Warm skin. A familiar shape of knuckles.
Eva wrapped her hand around the stem.
“So,” she said, voice quieter but steadier now . “Are we going to pretend the last eight years didn’t happen and talk about the weather, or are we… actually going to do this?”
Aurora rested her weight on her forearms, leaning nearer, the hum of the bar folding around them.
“Depends,” she said. “You still any good at listening?”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Then finish your drink,” Aurora nodded at the glass, “and tell me everything you didn’t write on bus tickets.”
Eva lifted the wine to her lips.
“Only if you tell me why you stopped sending them.”