Run: 2026-04-24-01KPZTVVSP36TWQCTTBNWF3F36

The green neon bled through the rain on the window, throwing sickly light over the scarred oak of the bar. Aurora was halfway through her second whisky when the door opened and she felt, rather than saw, the weather change. A gust of London damp, the smell of cigarettes, and the particular silence that arrived with someone who recognised her. She didn't look up. She'd learned, in her year of looking over her shoulder, that you never gave a watcher the satisfaction of your face until you'd already mapped their reflection in whatever glass was nearest. The bottle behind Silas' bar did well enough. A woman, tall, wrapped in a camel coat that had been expensive once and still pretended to be. Short blonde hair where there'd been a heavy copper plait. Red lipstick. Red lipstick, on Eva. "Jesus," Eva said. "It's actually you." Aurora set the glass down. "Hello, Ev." "Don't 'hello Ev' me like we had coffee last Tuesday." Eva slid onto the stool beside her without being asked, shrugging the coat off one shoulder. She smelled like something citrus and expensive. "Four years, Rory. Four. And your number's dead and your mother says she doesn't know and—" "My mother doesn't know." "I gathered." Eva lifted two fingers at Silas, who was polishing a glass with the unhurried attention of a man listening to everything. "Whatever she's having. And a water." "Water?" Aurora arched an eyebrow. "You used to drink me under." "I used to do a lot of things." Eva's mouth pulled at one corner, not quite a smile. "How did I find you, by the way. In case you were wondering. I wasn't looking. I was meeting a client across the road and he cancelled and it was raining and the sign was green and I thought, well, that's ominous enough for a Tuesday." "A client." "I'm at Herrington and Vale. Three years now." Eva waited, and when Aurora didn't offer anything, she gave a small, tight laugh. "Right. You wouldn't know. Solicitor. Property, mostly. I'm very boring and I wear tights and I have a mortgage in Clapham." Silas placed a whisky and a water in front of her and drifted to the far end of the bar without a word. Aurora was grateful for him, for the way his absence was also a kind of presence, a hand on the small of her back she couldn't quite feel. "You hated property law," Aurora said. "In second year, you wrote an essay so scathing about easements that Professor Mackie made you come to his office." "I remember." Eva turned the water glass in small, precise rotations. "I remember a lot of things. You in that awful yellow coat. You swearing you'd never practise. You saying the only thing worse than being a barrister was being your father." "And yet." "And yet." Eva lifted the water, drank, set it down. Her nails were short and buffed. No rings. "I couldn't find you, Rory. I tried. At first I tried, I mean. I rang Evan." Aurora's hand went very still around her glass. "I know," Eva said quickly. "I know now. He told me you'd gone to visit your aunt in Galway and that you were in a bad way and not to ring. And I believed him, because he was charming on the phone and I was twenty-three and stupid and it was easier to believe him than to drive to Cardiff. And then a year passed, and then another, and by the time I thought about it properly I didn't know how to start. I'm sorry." The apology sat between them like something breakable. "You told me to come to London," Aurora said. "In your last email. You said if I ever needed to get out, come to you." "I did say that." "I came." Eva looked at her then, properly, the way people look at a painting when they've finally understood what it's of. "When." "Eleven months ago." "Christ." Eva pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. Her mascara didn't smudge. "Christ, Rory. Where did you—how did you—" "A man took me in." Aurora nodded toward the far end of the bar. "I live upstairs. I deliver Chinese food for a woman called Yu-Fei. I read novels. I am, by every metric you'd recognise, doing nothing with my life." "That's not—" "It's fine." Aurora meant it, or wanted to, which was nearly the same thing. "It's the first time in a long time something has been fine." Eva's throat worked. "I looked you up, you know. On LinkedIn, like an idiot. I thought you'd be somewhere. Magic Circle, probably. You were the cleverest of us." "I was the most frightened of us," Aurora said. "Those aren't the same thing, though they look similar from the outside." Eva laughed, a small wet sound. "God, you always did that. Say something that sounded like a fortune cookie and meant it." "I missed you, Ev." "Don't." "I did." "Don't, Rory, because I will cry in this bar and I have a deposition in the morning." Eva drank the whole water in one go and set the glass down too hard. "I used to tell people about you. At parties. 'My best friend is going to be a QC one day and she'll defend me when I murder my flatmate.' And then I stopped telling people about you because it started to sound like I was making you up. Like you were an imaginary friend." "I wasn't imaginary. I was just quiet." "You were gone." "Yes." Aurora turned her glass between her fingers, watched the amber catch the green from the window. "I was gone." Silence then, the particular kind that old friends could wear without flinching. The rain picked up against the glass. Somewhere in the back, Silas ran water in a sink, deliberately loud, giving them the pretence of privacy. "He hit you," Eva said at last. Not a question. "Among other things." "I should have—" "Eva." Aurora put her hand over Eva's on the bar. The knuckles were thinner than she remembered. "If you write that sentence in your head one more time, I will leave. I swear to God. You didn't know. I didn't let you know. I made a career of not letting anyone know." Eva turned her hand up and laced their fingers. The small crescent scar on Aurora's wrist caught the light; Eva's thumb found it without looking, a motion so old it was almost embarrassing. "We were going to share a flat in Islington," Eva said. "We were going to have a cat called Bartholomew." "We were going to be insufferable." "We managed insufferable without the flat." Aurora squeezed her hand once and let go. "Tell me about your boring mortgage. Tell me about the tights." Eva exhaled something that was almost a laugh. She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist, quickly, the way someone does when they've decided they aren't crying. "The tights are appalling. The mortgage is worse. There's a man, sort of. He's called Dominic and he has opinions about wine." "Dominic." "I know." "Dominic." "I said I know." Eva picked up the whisky at last, the one Silas had poured, and considered it like a stranger. "One drink. Then I'm going home. And you're going to give me your number, your real one, and I am going to ring it, and you are going to answer." "Yes." "Say it properly." "I'll answer, Ev." Eva drank. Her eyes closed against the burn of it, and for a moment Aurora could see the girl she'd been at nineteen, freckled and loud and certain of everything, sitting inside the woman with the camel coat and the buffed nails, the way a candle sat inside a lantern. Then Eva opened her eyes and she was thirty again, and tired, and here. "You look well," Eva said. "That's the terrible thing. You look well." "So do you." "Liar." "Yes," Aurora agreed, and for the first time in a long time her smile reached her eyes. "But a kind one."