Run: 2026-03-18-01KM07EYBWH0D6W9GM0EPH7NYR

The green neon above The Raven’s Nest shone through the drizzle in a sickly stripe, turning the wet pavement outside into a smear of jade and black. Rory pushed through the door with a paper bag pressed under her arm, the heat from the street still on her cheeks, and the smell of old wood, beer, and lemon polish took her straight by the throat. Silas looked up from behind the bar, one hand around a glass, the silver signet ring on his right hand catching the low light. “Back so soon?” He nodded at the bag. “You owe me for that curry sauce you keep pretending doesn’t leak.” Rory huffed a breath and lifted the bag higher. “It’s for you, not me. Yu-Fei said if you complain this time, I should throw the next order at your head.” Silas’s mouth twitched at one corner. He took the bag with the careful ease of a man who had spent a life handling things he couldn’t afford to drop. “Then I’ll suffer in silence.” Rory slipped onto the nearest stool, fingers curled around the edge of the bar. The usual clutter sat in its usual places: a line of dusty bottles, the map of old Europe pinned behind the taps, black-and-white photographs of men in suits with hard eyes and cigarette smoke hanging in the frame like weather. The room stayed half-full, a low thrum of talk and glass and music that never got loud enough to demand attention. She rubbed at the inside of her wrist where the small crescent scar sat pale against her skin, a habit she never noticed until she’d already done it. Silas was halfway to the kitchen when Rory’s attention snagged on the woman at the far end of the bar. She sat with her back straight, one ankle hooked over the other, a glass untouched in front of her. Rory caught the shape of a tailored coat, dark and expensive-looking, the sharp line of a jaw, hair cut into a blunt swing that skimmed her collar. The woman turned her head as if she’d felt the stare. Rory’s stomach dropped clean through her. The face had changed, but not enough. “Eva?” The woman’s eyes widened first, then her whole face seemed to reorganise around the name. For a second she looked younger, stripped down to some earlier version of herself Rory had almost stopped carrying around. “Rory.” Her voice came out with the same Cardiff scrape it had had at sixteen, only sanded down at the edges, like someone had spent years smoothing it against glass. Rory slid off the stool before she realised she’d moved. The floor felt slightly unsteady under her trainers. She stopped three feet away and stared. “You’ve got a cheek showing up like this.” Eva gave a short laugh that did not quite land. “I could say the same.” Rory took her in properly then. The coat, the clean nails, the neat scarf tucked at the throat. No chipped polish. No cheap hoop earrings. No frayed hem. Even her hair looked deliberate, every strand placed. The last time Rory had seen her, Eva had worn a school blazer with the sleeves rolled and ink on her hands, her backpack half-zipped and full of books she never carried home on time. This version of her looked like she belonged in a glass office tower with tinted windows and a lock on the door. Rory pointed a finger at her without meaning to. “You look like you charge people by the hour.” Eva’s mouth tugged. “And you look like you’ve been dragged backwards through a hedge.” “Cheers.” Silas’s boots crossed the floor behind Rory. He set a tumbler down at the end of the bar, then another, and let the silence hang while he looked from one woman to the other. Something in his face shifted, not surprise exactly, but interest sharpened to a blade’s edge. “You two know each other, then.” Eva’s gaze flicked to him. “Long time ago.” Silas tipped his head once, the way he did when he’d clocked more than he let on. “I’ll leave you to it.” He moved off without another word, the slight drag in his left leg soft against the floorboards. Rory watched him go, then looked back at Eva and felt the weight of everything unsaid settle between them like furniture. She folded her arms tight over her chest. “You disappeared.” Eva’s expression held, but her fingers tightened around the stem of the glass in front of her. “So did you.” “I moved to London because you told me to.” “You left because you had to.” Rory let out a sharp breath through her nose. “That’s not the same thing.” Eva looked down at the amber liquid in her glass. The light caught the edge of a scar across one knuckle, pale and thin. Rory wondered when that had happened, and why she had never known. “You vanished from Cardiff like someone had cut the tether.” “You stopped answering.” “That’s rich.” Rory leaned both palms on the bar. “I rang you.” Eva lifted her head. “Once.” Rory laughed, but there was no humour in it. “I rang you six times. You never answered the last three.” “You left a voice note the length of a sermon.” Rory blinked. “You kept that?” Eva shrugged one shoulder, a movement that looked strange on her, too restrained for the girl who used to fling herself across bus seats and stick her feet on tables. “I didn’t delete it.” The words hit harder than they should have. Rory looked away first, because she hated that. Hated that one line could crack open all the careful years she’d stacked between them. From somewhere near the front of the bar, somebody laughed too loudly. Glass tapped wood. A couple near the window argued over whose turn it was to pay. The room kept moving around them, indifferent. Rory picked at the edge of the napkin holder. “You could have come down.” Eva’s gaze sharpened. “To where? Your flat over the bar? The one you said you weren’t living in properly because you didn’t want anyone finding you?” Rory went still. “That was not an invitation to forget me.” Eva laughed once, a dry little sound. “No? Because it sounded a hell of a lot like one.” Rory opened her mouth, then shut it. She hated that too, the way Eva still knew where to poke. The way she still did it without raising her voice. She looked at Eva’s hands again. No chipped nails. No cheap rings. The woman at the end of the bar looked composed in a way that came from being watched by people who expected answers on time. Rory could not reconcile that with the girl who once stole cigarettes from her brother and cried over a dead fox on the road outside Penarth. “What happened to you?” Eva’s eyebrow lifted. “That’s a rude question.” “You turned up in my bar wearing enough money to buy the street.” Eva’s gaze slid over Rory’s face, down to the faded delivery jacket, the canvas bag slung over the stool, the scuffed trainers and wind-flattened hair. It landed on the crescent scar on her wrist when Rory shifted her hand. “You’re still wearing the mark,” Eva murmured. Rory covered the scar with her other hand before she could stop herself. “Christ. I got that when I was eight.” “I know.” Rory’s voice came out flatter than she meant. “Then stop staring at it like it means something.” Eva’s throat worked once before she drank. She set the glass down with care. “It does mean something.” Rory looked at her hard. “Don’t.” Eva held her stare. “You left Cardiff angry enough to bite through steel. I left because I couldn’t stay around and watch you get swallowed by Evan.” Rory’s jaw tightened at the name. The bar seemed to shrink around it. “I didn’t ask you to save me.” “No. You never asked for anything.” The line landed clean and mean. Rory felt it in the muscles across her shoulders, in the old reflex to brace for another hit. Silas came back with a bottle and two fresh tumblers, stopping just close enough to make his presence known without forcing it. He set the bottle down between them. The label caught the light, then darkened again. “No fighting in my bar,” he muttered, and the words came with the dry patience of a man speaking to weather. Rory did not look at him. “We’re not fighting.” Eva’s mouth twitched at that, but the expression faded before it settled. Silas poured two fingers into each glass and moved off again, leaving the bottle where it stood like a small truce. Rory took one of the fresh tumblers and turned it in her hand. The whisky in it made a slow amber line against the glass. “You’ve changed,” she said. Eva let her head tip back against the stool. “So have you.” Rory glanced at her sharp suit, the clean line of her coat, the watch flashing at her wrist. “I changed because life kicked the teeth in.” Eva gave a short, humourless smile. “That’s one way of putting it.” Rory leaned forward. “You used to hate expensive things.” “I still do.” “You’re wearing them.” Eva looked down at the coat as if she had just noticed it herself. “I borrowed it.” “From who?” Eva’s eyes lifted. “Someone who owed me.” Rory snorted into her glass. “That sounds like you’re living a different life.” Eva’s fingers tightened around her own drink. When she answered, her voice lost some of its polish and the Cardiff came through again, rough around the edges. “I am.” Rory watched her for a long moment. There was a little exhaustion in the lines beside Eva’s mouth that the old girl had never carried. There was also a caution Rory had only seen on people who’d learned to measure rooms before they stepped into them. “Why are you here?” Eva looked at the bottle on the bar, then at Rory. “Because I heard you were in London.” Rory gave a flat laugh. “You heard.” Eva’s face didn’t move. “I looked.” That shut Rory up for a beat. She gripped the glass harder than she needed to, then rested it on the bar before she cracked it. “You looked,” she repeated. “And you still let me work two streets from where you were breathing.” Eva’s jaw set. “You didn’t make it easy.” “Easy?” Rory stared at her, bright blue eyes hard and bright under the bar lights. “You told me to get out. You told me London was better than Cardiff and that I needed somewhere nobody knew my name. Then you vanished before I’d even got the keys to the flat.” Eva’s expression tightened, the first sign of strain she’d shown. “I was dealing with things.” “Right.” “I had work.” “You always had work.” The words snapped between them. Eva flinched, small and quick enough that Rory almost missed it. Silas’s glass clinked behind the bar. Somewhere near the door, someone called for another round. Eva drew in a breath through her nose and let it go. “I didn’t know how to come back.” Rory looked at her then, really looked. At the careful hair, the bruised shadow under one eye she’d missed before, the way Eva kept one hand close to her glass like it steadied her. The polished surface cracked a little, and underneath there was still the girl who had once slept on Rory’s floor after a row with her mother, who had drawn stars on the edge of lecture notes and told Rory she would get out one day. Rory’s voice came quieter. “You could have written.” Eva’s smile was thin and sad. “You still checked the post?” Rory’s laugh broke out before she could stop it, one sharp bark of disbelief. “No.” Eva’s eyes held hers. “Neither did I.” The silence that followed was not empty. It carried years in it. Bus stations. Unanswered calls. The black screen of a phone held in a hand too late at night. Things that should have been said and never got the chance. Rory picked up the bottle, checked the label, and poured herself a measure she did not need. “You look like you’ve got a life now.” Eva watched the whisky rise. “So do you.” Rory slid the bottle back. “This one’s mostly shifts, takeaway grease, and a flat with dodgy pipes.” Eva’s mouth softened a fraction. “You always did know how to dress up the romance.” Rory looked at her, then finally gave in to it, the smallest smile pulling at one side of her mouth. “You came in here looking like you belonged on the cover of something boring.” “I didn’t come for the ambience.” “Then what did you come for?” Eva held her gaze, and the noise of the bar seemed to press back around them, waiting. Silas, at the far end, stacked a clean row of glasses and looked over once, his face unreadable beneath the low light. Eva set her hand flat on the bar, right beside Rory’s scarred wrist. Not touching. Close enough to make the space matter. “I came because I needed to see if you’d still talk to me.”