Run: 2026-02-19-01KHV72HN02W87GC91BWD7XF8R

The Raven's Nest was quiet on Thursday afternoons, the kind of quiet that felt purposeful rather than empty. Silas kept it that way. He'd told Rory once that the lunch crowd drained a place of its character, left it smelling of other people's chips and disappointment, so he didn't open until four. She'd laughed at that. She still thought about it sometimes when she came down the stairs from her flat and heard him moving behind the bar, glasses clinking in the dimness, the old building sighing around him. She wasn't supposed to be down here. She had a delivery run at half five, and she still hadn't ironed her jacket, and the particular fatigue of a double shift sat behind her eyes like something waiting to harden. But she'd come downstairs anyway because she'd smelled coffee and couldn't remember if she'd turned off the hob two nights ago, which meant she probably hadn't, which meant she needed to check. She hadn't, but that wasn't what stopped her in the doorway. There was a woman sitting at the far end of the bar. She had her back to Rory and one hand wrapped around a glass of something amber, and her hair was different — shorter now, cut blunt at the jaw in a way that suggested a decision rather than a trim — but the tilt of her shoulders, the specific way she held herself like she was bracing for weather, that hadn't changed at all. "Eva." The woman turned. Three years had done something to Eva Marsh's face that Rory couldn't immediately name. The angles were the same, the dark eyes and the sharp nose and the mouth that always looked like it was a second behind whatever expression she was attempting. But there was a stillness to her now that hadn't been there before. Eva had always moved like she was late for something. This woman looked like she'd stopped running. "Rory." Eva's voice was lower than she remembered. "God. Hi." Silas appeared from somewhere behind the bar, set down the glass he'd been polishing, and manufactured a reason to disappear into the back. He'd spent forty years reading rooms. Rory had watched him do it and still couldn't catch the moment he decided to go. She crossed to the bar and sat down two stools away from Eva. Not deliberately. It was just where her body stopped. "Silas called you," Rory said. "He didn't have to call me, I was in the area—" Eva stopped. Set her glass down. "Yes. He called me." "Right." Rory turned and found the coffee she'd come down for, already poured, sitting at her usual spot with a small plate of something Silas had clearly left for her earlier and not mentioned. She wrapped both hands around the mug. "Why?" "He said you'd been looking rough." "He said that." "He said you hadn't slept properly in two weeks and that you'd turned down three shifts at the restaurant and that you spent most of yesterday sitting on the fire escape in the rain." Eva picked up her glass again but didn't drink from it. "He said he was worried." "He's a spy. Worrying is his hobby." "He's not a spy anymore." "He'll never not be a spy." A silence settled between them that had shape and texture. Outside, a bus groaned past. Someone on the street laughed at something, bright and sudden, and then it was gone. Eva said, "You look well." "You don't have to do that." "I'm not—" She exhaled. "You do. You look well. You look older." "Cheers." "It's not an insult." Eva finally drank. Set the glass down with a small, careful click. "I look older too. I look about a hundred and four." Rory looked at her then, properly. The stillness she'd noticed wasn't stillness, exactly. It was more like Eva had learned to take up less space. There was a ring on her left hand that hadn't been there three years ago, a thin gold band that caught the low light when she moved. There were faint shadows under her eyes that matched Rory's own. "You got married," Rory said. Eva's thumb moved to the ring automatically, touched it. "Last spring. His name's Daniel. He teaches secondary school maths. He's—" She stopped. A small, complicated thing crossed her face. "He's very kind." "That's good." "Yes." They sat with it. The bar smelled of old wood and something faintly botanical from the bottles behind the counter. One of the photographs on the wall — a street scene somewhere European, somewhere that looked like it had been beautiful before it had been bombed — watched them both from behind cracked glass. "I'm sorry I didn't call," Rory said. "After I moved here. I kept meaning to." "I know." "I didn't not call because of anything you did." "I know that too." Eva turned on her stool to face her fully. "I knew you were okay. You texted every few months. Little nothing texts, like you were checking in but didn't want me to check back." She said it without accusation, which somehow made it worse. "I texted back things like 'sounds good' and 'so glad'. Like we were colleagues." "We were handling it." "We were pretending." Eva's eyes didn't leave her face. "We've known each other since we were nine years old, Rory. We used to share a sleeping bag at my nan's house because you were scared of the dark and I was scared of being alone in a room and we told each other everything." "We were children." "Yes." Eva looked down at her glass. "We were." The coffee had gone lukewarm without Rory noticing. She drank it anyway. On the shelf behind the bar, a clock she'd never paid attention to ticked steadily, filling the gap where a response should have been. "Things happened," Rory said finally. "After Evan. I wasn't—" She turned the mug in her hands. The crescent scar on her left wrist caught the light for a moment, then didn't. "I wasn't fit to be anyone's friend for a while." "I knew about Evan." Eva's voice was careful. "Not everything. But I knew." "I didn't want you to." "I know you didn't." "I didn't want anyone to." Rory set the mug down. "That's why I didn't call. Not because of you. Because every time I heard someone's voice from before, it made me feel like I was still her. Like nothing had changed." Eva was quiet for a moment. Then: "Has it? Changed?" Rory thought about the fire escape in the rain. She thought about the three shifts she hadn't taken and the particular quality of 3 a.m. when the bar was closed and the street below was empty and she lay on her ceiling with her eyes open. "Some of it," she said. Eva nodded slowly. She didn't push. That was new — or maybe Rory had simply forgotten that Eva could do this, could hold a silence without filling it, could let something be partial without demanding the rest.