Run: 2026-02-19-01KHTY5KSE8A9GR60F6RGRSQS9

The green neon sign flickered outside, casting pale light across the rain-slicked pavement. Aurora pushed through the door of The Raven's Nest, the familiar smell of old wood and whiskey wrapping around her like a worn blanket. Her delivery shift had ended an hour ago, but her feet had carried her here instead of up the narrow stairs to her flat. She hadn't planned on drinking. She'd planned on hiding. The bar was nearly empty on a Tuesday night. A few regulars hunched over their pints near the window, and the old man who always sat three stools from the end—Harold, she thought—nodded at her from behind his crossword. Aurora made her way to the far corner, choosing a table obscured by shadow, and collapsed into the chair. "Rough night?" She looked up. Silas was already there, a glass of water sliding across the table toward her. He moved with that quiet efficiency she'd come to recognize over the past six months—the slight limp barely noticeable now, the silver signet ring catching the dim light as he set down a napkin. "Not rough," she said. "Just needed to not be alone." He studied her for a moment, that retired spymaster's gaze that saw too much and said too little. Then he nodded and turned back toward the bar. Aurora wrapped her fingers around the glass but didn't drink. The street outside had gone quiet in that way London did sometimes, as if the city itself was holding its breath. The door opened. Closed. Footsteps on the worn floorboards. She didn't look up. Didn't want to see whoever had just walked in, didn't want to make conversation or exchange pleasantries or perform the social rituals that exhausted her lately. But the footsteps stopped. Close. Too close. "Rory?" The name hit her like cold water. No one called her Rory here. No one knew that name except— Aurora's head snapped up. Eva stood three feet away, rain still dripping from the tips of her dark hair, her coat splattered with the evening's drizzle. She'd lost weight. Her cheekbones were sharper, her eyes bigger, and her hand—her left hand—was missing the promise ring she'd worn for three years. Eva. Her Eva. The girl who'd shared her childhood, her secrets, her bed in that cramped Cardiff flat when they were seventeen and terrified and certain they'd escape together. What are you doing in London?" The words came out flat, harsher than Aurora intended. She watched Eva flinch, watched the smile that had been forming on her lips falter and fall. "I could ask you the same thing." Eva's voice was softer than Aurora remembered. Worn down at the edges. "I tried your parents' place. Your mum said you'd moved to London. She wasn't... she wasn't happy. About the leaving." "Mum had plenty to say about plenty of things." Aurora gestured to the empty chair across from her. What else was she supposed to do? Tell her to leave? Pretend she didn't exist? Eva sat. Her eyes moved over Aurora's face, cataloging changes—the new sharpness in her jaw, the way her black hair had been cut shorter, the exhaustion that Aurora knew sat beneath her eyes like bruises. "You look different," Eva said. "You look thinner." The words hung between them, sharp and too true. Eva looked away, toward the bar where Silas was polishing a glass with deliberate concentration. "Is this your place?" Eva asked. "I live upstairs. He lets me stay above the bar." Aurora took a sip of water, mainly to have something to do with her hands. "I work delivering food for a restaurant. Chinese place. Not glamorous, but it pays." "It's honest." There it was. That tone. The one that said Eva was measuring, comparing, finding Aurora wanting. "Was that ever the issue?" Aurora asked. "Honesty?" Eva's hand went to her left wrist, rubbing at the skin there. A nervous habit. Aurora remembered that from years ago, from the nights they'd stayed up talking until dawn, from the promises they'd made in the dark. "I was worried about you," Eva said. "When you left. You didn't—I didn't know where—" "I left because I had to." "Because of him?" Aurora didn't answer. She didn't have to. They both knew who *him* was. Evan. The name still tasted like bile in her throat, even now, even months later. "I looked for you," Eva said. Her voice had dropped, become something raw and scraped hollow. "After. I tried to find you. But you'd vanished. And then your mum was saying you'd gone to London, and I thought—I don't know what I thought. That maybe if I came here, if I saw—" "You thought you'd find the person you remembered." "I thought I'd find my friend." The word hit its mark. Aurora felt it land somewhere in her chest, a small precise pain. "Your friend," she repeated. "Right. The friend who called you every week for two years while you were busy building a life that didn't include her. The friend who watched you get engaged and move in together and start planning a future that had absolutely no room in it for someone like me." "That's not fair." "None of it's fair, Eva." The anger surprised Aurora. She'd thought she'd buried it, packed it away with everything else she'd left behind in Cardiff. But here it was, rising up fresh as the night she'd packed her bag while Evan slept off another bottle of whiskey, as the night she'd called Eva from the train station andEva had answered with sleep in her voice and said *Rory? It's two in the morning* and Aurora had said *I need you* and Eva had said *I can't, not tonight, I've got that thing in the morning*— But that wasn't true, was it? That wasn't how it happened. Aurora closed her eyes. Breathed. "I'm sorry," she said finally. "That was—that came out wrong." "You meant it." "I meant some of it." Eva laughed, a short bitter sound. "You always were honest. Even when it hurt." "Not honest enough." Aurora looked at her old friend, at the stranger with Eva's face. "I should have told you. About Evan. About what was happening. I should have—" "Would it have changed anything?" The question hung there, unanswerable. Aurora thought about those last months in Cardiff, the bruises she'd hidden under long sleeves, the way she'd stopped answering her phone because Evan's jealousy had become a living thing that followed her everywhere. She thought about how easy it would have been to reach out, to say *help me*, to let someone in. But that wasn't who she'd been then. That wasn't who anyone had taught her to be. "I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe. Maybe not. But you deserved the choice." Eva's hand found her wrist again, rubbing at that spot. The skin there was red, irritated. "I saw him," Eva said quietly. "A few months ago. In Cardiff. He was with some woman, looked all charmed up, buying her drinks. And I thought about you. About everything. And I realized I'd spent two years being angry at you for disappearing when I should have been angry at myself for not seeing." "Eva—" "I should have known. The signs were there. The way you'd flinch sometimes when someone raised their voice. The way you stopped talking about him after the first year. The way you—" Her voice cracked. "I should have seen." Aurora reached across the table. Hesitated. Then took Eva's hand. "You didn't know. That's the thing about people like him. They're so good at making you believe everything's fine. That you deserve it. That there's no way out." "How did you get out?" "Someone saw me. Really saw me." Aurora thought about Silas, about the first night she'd stumbled into his bar half-feral with fear, about the way he'd looked at her and asked no questions and simply handed her a key to the upstairs flat. "Someone gave me a chance when I couldn't give one to myself." Eva squeezed her hand. Her eyes were wet now, shining in the low light. "I'm glad," she said. "That someone found you." They sat like that for a long moment, two women carved from the same childhood clay but shaped by different hands, different years, different wounds. The bar hummed quietly around them, indifferent to the small miracle unfolding in its corner. "I don't know how to be your friend again," Aurora said finally. "I don't know how to be anyone anymore. I'm still figuring out how to be me." "I don't need you to be who you were." Eva wiped at her eyes with her free hand. "I just needed to know you were okay. That you were still here." "I'm here." It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't a resolution. It was something smaller and more fragile—a beginning, maybe, or the possibility of one. Eva smiled, tentative and hopeful. "Can I buy you a drink?" Aurora looked at her, at this woman who had once known her better than anyone, who had shared her bed and her secrets and her dreams. The years between them stretched out like a wound, but maybe wounds could heal. Maybe scars were just evidence that the body had tried to repair itself. "Yeah," she said. "Okay." She didn't let go of Eva's hand as they walked to the bar together, and if Silas noticed the tears on either of their faces, he was kind enough not to mention it.