Run: 2026-03-18-01KM1GGDEMEZ8CWGRGG5R8ZHM1

The green neon sign above the door buzzed and flickered, a familiar hum Aurora had learned to sleep through in the months since she'd moved into the flat upstairs. She set down a tray of clean glasses behind the bar, the weight of them familiar in her hands now, calluses forming where the handles pressed. "You've gotten efficient at that." Rory glanced up. Silas stood in the doorway to the back, a stack of napkins tucked under one arm, watching her with that expression she couldn't quite read. Not disapproval. Something closer to amusement, maybe. Or pity dressed up as something else. "Three months of practice," she said. "You'd think I'd get a gold star." "You've earned more than napkins, working for Yu-Fei and then coming down here to help me close." He set the napkins on the counter, arranging them with the same precision he brought to everything. "Though I still don't understand why you insist on the extra hours. The rent is paid." "Force of habit. Can't sit in that flat alone with my thoughts." She hadn't meant to say it. The words slipped out before she could catch them, and Silas's hands paused mid-arrangement. For a moment the only sound was the low murmur of the jazz record he kept playing in the background, something mournful and slow. "Hell of a week, then?" "Anniversary. That's all." He didn't ask which anniversary. He had enough tact for that, even if his eyes said he wanted to push. Instead he nodded toward the nearly empty bar. "Coat check girl just came in. Sitting by the window if you want company. Not exactly your usual crowd, but she looks like she could use a drink and a friendly face." Rory glanced over. The woman had her back to the room, shoulders hunched over a whiskey neat, dark hair pulled back in a style that seemed too formal for Soho on a Thursday night. Something about the angle of her neck. The way she held her glass. Rory felt her stomach drop before her brain caught up. "No," she said. "No, she's—" The woman turned on her barstool, angling for a better view of the room, and their eyes met across the dim space. Eva Castellan looked exactly the same and nothing like her at all. She was thinner now. The angles of her face sharper, the kind of sharp that came from stress or illness or simply letting yourself go in ways you never would have at twenty. Her lipstick was the wrong shade—too dark, almost burgundy—and her eyes, those familiar warm brown eyes, had dark circles underneath that makeup couldn't quite hide. Rory's feet carried her to the barstool beside Eva before she'd made the conscious decision to move. "Rory." Eva's voice cracked on her name. "God. I didn't—I tried to find you. After everything, I tried." "I know." "You changed your number." "I changed everything." They sat in silence. The jazz track ended, cycling into something with more piano, something that felt too cheerful for the moment. Silas had disappeared into the back, giving them privacy with the same deliberate care he brought to everything. "You're here," Eva said. "You're actually here. In London. I thought—I didn't know if you'd left the country. After what he did, I thought maybe you just... disappeared." "I kind of did." "The flat above the bar. You're living in a flat above a bar." Rory laughed, a short, sharp sound. "Cardiff's loss, London's gain. Or something like that." "It's a nice bar. Old. Feels like the kind of place people come to forget things." "Maybe that's the point." Eva took a long drink. Her hand trembled slightly, just enough that the ice shifted in her glass. "I got the promotion. Finally. Made partner last spring." "Partner at Harding and Associates? That's—that's good, Eva. That's really good." "I hated it." She set her glass down hard. "I hate it. I hate the hours, I hate the cases, I hate that I spent seven years studying for something I don't even want to do. Do you know what I told myself? I told myself it would be worth it. That once I made it, once I proved that I could do it, I'd feel different. I'd feel like I earned something." "Did you?" "No." Eva stared into her whiskey like it held answers. "I feel like I wasted seven years being miserable because I thought I was supposed to be. Because my parents expected it. Because you left and I didn't know what else to do with myself." The words hit like a physical thing. Rory felt them in her chest, a tightness that spread outward. "Eva—" "I should have gone with you." Eva's voice broke. "When you called me that night, bleeding in a car park with your wrist all wrong, I should have gotten in the car. I should have left everything behind like you did." "You had exams. You had—" "I had excuses." Eva shook her head. "I had a future mapped out and I was too scared to mess it up. And you—you just ran. You got in your car and you drove and you didn't look back, and I've spent two years wondering if I should have done the same thing." Rory thought about the weeks after she'd left. The grey London sky, the unfamiliar streets, the job at Golden Empress that she'd taken because it didn't require anything from her except the ability to pedal a bike and follow directions. The way she'd cried in her new flat at night, missing Cardiff even though she'd sworn she never wanted to see it again. The way she'd built a life out of silence and routine and deliberate smallness, because small was safe, small meant no one could find her, small meant she could figure out who she was without anyone watching. "You made the right choice," she said. "For you. You wanted stability. You wanted to finish what you started. There's nothing wrong with that." "But you're happy." Rory opened her mouth to protest, to explain that happy was too strong a word, that what she felt was closer to numb or maybe just surviving. But she looked at Eva—at the exhaustion written into every line of her face, at the way she clutched her glass like it was the only solid thing in the room—and she couldn't do it. "I'm getting there," she said instead. "Some days are better than others. Silas lets me work extra shifts when I need the distraction. Turns out making drinks and wiping down tables is good for the brain when you don't want to think." "Is that what you want to do? Forever?" "Do I look like someone who knows what she wants forever?" Eva laughed, wet and broken. "You look like someone who's been through hell and came out the other side." "Does the other side look like a bar in Soho?" "It looks like someone who's still standing. That's more than a lot of people can say." The silence stretched between them, but it was different now. Softer. The weight of it still there, but shared. "I should have visited," Eva said. "I should have called more. I should have—" "You were scared. I was scared. We both made choices based on being scared." Rory reached out, resting her hand on Eva's arm. "I don't blame you for not coming. I don't blame you for any of it. I just wish—I wish one of us had been brave enough to say what we really wanted. Instead of what we thought we were supposed to want." "Is that what you did? You stopped doing what you were supposed to do?" "I stopped doing what Evan wanted. And then I didn't know how to do anything else, so I just... stopped. For a while." She pulled her hand back, rubbing at the scar on her wrist without thinking about it. "Turns out stopping is its own kind of running." "And now?" Rory glanced around the bar. The maps on the walls. The photographs of places she'd never been. The old wood polished smooth by decades of elbows and glasses. Silas's domain, but somehow also becoming hers. "Now I'm figuring it out. One shift at a time." Eva nodded slowly. She finished her whiskey, set the glass down with a definitive click. "I can't stay," she said. "I have a flight back tomorrow morning. An early one, because apparently that's the only kind I book anymore." "Of course you do." "But maybe—" Eva hesitated. "Maybe next time I'm in London, we could do this again. Talk more. If you want." "I'd like that." They stood. Neither of them moved to hug, but Eva reached out and squeezed Rory's hand, quick and tight, and Rory squeezed back. "Take care of yourself, Aurora." "You too, Eva." She watched Eva walk to the door, pausing only to drop a twenty on the bar for a tab she'd barely touched. The door swung open, letting in a rush of cool night air, and then she was gone, swallowed by the London dark. Rory stood there for a long moment. Then she picked up the twenty, folded it carefully, and slipped it into the register. "Everything okay?" Silas emerged from the back, wiping his hands on a towel. "She needed a drink and a friendly face. I was one of them." He studied her for a moment. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to. You know that." "I know." She grabbed the tray of clean glasses again. "But I wanted to. For once, I actually wanted to." She carried the glasses to the shelf, lining them up one by one, the familiar motion grounding her in the present. Outside, the neon sign buzzed and flickered, casting green shadows across the empty bar. She was still figuring it out. Still learning how to be someone new while carrying the weight of who she'd been. But for the first time in a long while, that weight felt lighter. Shared, maybe. Or maybe just acknowledged. Either way, it was a start.