Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTX38ATPJWVWBYCHKZ2JYMD

The neon sign flickered outside, casting green shadows across the wet pavement. Inside, The Raven's Nest breathed its familiar mix of old wood and cheaper spirits. Aurora wiped down the bar counter, her black hair falling across her face as she worked through the last of the evening crowd. The maps on the walls seemed to watch her in the low light, their edges curling with age. She didn't hear the door open over the low murmur of the television showing a football match. Didn't look up until the figure settled onto a stool three places down from where she stood. "Rory?" The voice was familiar in a way that made her chest tight. She raised her head. Eva Whitmore looked different. Of course she did—five years was enough time to reshape anyone. Her blonde hair had darkened to a warm brown, cropped short in a way that sharpened her jaw. She wore a cream coat that probably cost more than Rory made in a week, and her eyes, still that same pale grey, held something cautious behind their recognition. Aurora's hands stilled on the cloth. "Eva." The name hung between them like smoke. "I didn't—" Eva started, then stopped. She glanced around the bar, at the maps, the photographs, the dim corners where regulars sat with their quiet pints. "Silas's place, right? He mentioned you lived above somewhere." "He talks about you?" The words came out sharper than Rory intended. "Occasionally." Eva's mouth thinned. "We bump into each other. Conferences, that sort of thing." Of course. Eva had always moved in different circles. Still did, apparently. The bar suddenly felt smaller, the air heavier. Rory set down her cloth. "What can I get you?" "Just a gin and tonic. Please." Rory turned to the bottles, grateful for the moment to collect herself. Her reflection swam in the mirrored back wall—same bright blue eyes, same straight black hair, same small crescent scar visible above her wrist where her sleeve had ridden up. But she felt older than thirty-five, older than the twenty-five she'd been when she'd fled Cardiff with nothing but a suitcase and a borrowed phone number. She poured the drink and slid it across the bar. Eva's fingers brushed hers briefly as she took it. "Thank you." Eva took a long sip, then set the glass down. "You look—" "Don't." "Fair enough." Eva's laugh was quieter than Rory remembered. Softer around the edges. "You look good, is what I was going to say. Different, but good." Rory leaned against the counter, arms crossed. "How's Richard?" Something flickered across Eva's face. "Richard and I divorced two years ago." "Oh." The word sat awkward between them. "I'm sorry." "Don't be. It was—" Eva shook her head. "It was for the best. We wanted different things. He wanted a wife who attended his firm's dinners and smiled at his clients. I wanted—" She stopped, looked down at her drink. "It doesn't matter now." Rory remembered the wedding. She'd attended as a bridesmaid, back when they were still speaking, back before everything had curdled between them. Eva in white lace, radiant and certain. Rory in sage green, smiling through the reception while her own marriage crumbled quietly in the background. "It was a nice wedding," Rory said, because she couldn't think of anything else to say. "It was a beautiful funeral," Eva replied, and her voice cracked just slightly on the last word. "The marriage, I mean. Not the—obviously not the—" "I know what you mean." They were quiet for a moment. The football match droned on, irrelevant. Someone at the far end of the bar laughed at something on their phone. "I should have called," Eva said finally. "After you left. I kept meaning to, and then months would pass, and it got harder." "I didn't call either." "No. I suppose you didn't." Rory thought about those first months in London, sleeping on Eva's couch, eating takeout containers on the floor while they watched films and didn't talk about why Rory was there. The bruise on her arm that had faded from purple to yellow. The way she'd wake up some nights gasping, reaching for a body that wasn't there anymore. "You were busy," Rory said. "With the wedding. With Richard." "That was never an excuse." "No," Rory agreed. "It wasn't." Eva turned her glass slowly on the bar, leaving a ring of condensation on the wood. "I looked for you, you know. After. When things started going wrong with Richard. I thought maybe—" She laughed bitterly. "I thought maybe you'd have some insight. You always saw through him faster than I did." "I thought you didn't want to hear it." "Because you said he was wrong for me?" "I said he made you smaller. You didn't want to hear that." Eva's jaw tightened. "You could have been there anyway. Even if I didn't want to hear it." "And you could have come with me when I left." The words were out before Rory could stop them, sharp and old and still bleeding. "When I called you at two in the morning, crying in a service station car park, you could have said yes." The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. "I was getting married in six months," Eva said quietly. "I couldn't just—" "No. You couldn't." "I'm sorry, Rory." Rory looked at her old friend—at the woman she'd shared bedrooms with as teenagers, whose shoulder she'd cried on when her father left, who had held her hair back in Cardiff's dingiest pub when she was seventeen and thought she knew everything about heartbreak. That woman was still in there somewhere, behind the careful makeup and the expensive coat. "I know," Rory said. "I am too." Eva's eyes glistened. She reached across the space between them and touched Rory's hand, just briefly. "Are we too late? To be—whatever we were?" Rory thought about the hidden room behind the bookshelf, the contacts Silas still kept, the life she'd built in the margins of this city. The part-time deliveries and the law books she still couldn't bring herself to open. The way she still jumped at loud voices and checked over her shoulder on empty streets. "I don't know," she said honestly. "But I'd like to find out." Eva smiled—tentative, fragile, the same smile she'd given Rory the night before her wedding when she'd admitted she was terrified. "I'd like that too." The bar settled around them, its old maps and photographs keeping their quiet vigil. Outside, the green neon sign continued to flicker, casting its uncertain glow through the darkness.