Run: 2026-05-29-01KSSKBMEV1A2RQ9SZVTXBFG6H

The green neon sign threw its sickly light across the wet pavement outside, and inside The Raven's Nest the rain had pushed in a thin crowd of people who didn't want to go home yet. Rory liked the bar best on nights like this, when the maps on the walls seemed to soften at their edges and the photographs—men in trench coats, women squinting against foreign suns—looked less like decoration and more like company. She had finished her last delivery an hour ago. The grease of the Golden Empress still clung faintly to her sleeves, but Silas had poured her a whisky and waved off her money, and she had let the warmth of it loosen the knot that lived between her shoulders. She didn't see the woman come in. She heard her. "God, it's biblical out there." The voice arrived before the face did, and even after seven years it landed in Rory's chest like a key turning in a long-disused lock. She set down her glass. By the door, shaking the rain from a camel coat that probably cost more than a month of Rory's wages, stood Eva. For a moment Rory thought she might be wrong. The Eva she remembered had been all elbows and cheap hair dye, a girl who laughed too loudly in libraries and stole chips off other people's plates. This woman was smoothed down, finished, lacquered like a piece of good furniture. Her hair was a careful honey colour now. Her nails were short and immaculate. But then she turned, scanning the room with that old restless hunger, and her gaze snagged on Rory and stopped. "No," Eva said. "No, that's not—Rory?" "Hi, Eva." The space between them seemed enormous and then no distance at all. Eva crossed it in three strides and pulled Rory off the stool into a hug that smelled of perfume and rain, and for a second Rory forgot the seven years entirely, forgot London and the bar and the long careful work of becoming someone new. Then Eva drew back, hands still gripping Rory's arms, and looked at her the way you look at a photograph you've found at the bottom of a drawer. "Your hair," Eva said. "You cut it all off. And it's black—you've gone and dyed it black." "It suits the city," Rory said. "It's so strange." Eva laughed, but the laugh had a brittle edge. "I keep thinking I see people from home and it's never them. And then it's you." Rory gestured at the stool beside her. Silas, who missed nothing, was already setting down a second glass without being asked, his signet ring catching the light as he poured. He gave Rory a look—an eyebrow, no more—and then drifted to the far end of the bar to leave them to it. "Who's that?" Eva murmured, sliding onto the stool, slipping out of the coat. "Silas. He owns the place. I live upstairs." "You live above a *bar*." Eva said it the way she might have said *you live in a skip*. She had not meant it unkindly, Rory thought. Eva had never meant much unkindly. She simply spoke in prices, in the unconscious arithmetic of a life that had gone the way it was supposed to. "I'm in London for work. A conference. I almost didn't come out tonight." "What is it you do now?" "Consultancy. It's boring. I'd bore you." Eva waved the question away and drank. "Tell me about you. Last anyone heard you'd dropped off the face of the earth. Your mum wouldn't say where you'd gone. Brendan looked like he'd aged ten years." The mention of her father sat in Rory's stomach like a swallowed stone. She turned her glass slowly on the bar, watching the whisky climb the sides. "I needed to disappear for a while," she said. Eva's eyes flicked, just once, to Rory's left wrist, to the small crescent scar there, white against the skin. She had been there the day Rory got it—a fall from the Ellises' garden wall, the two of them nine years old and certain they could fly. Rory saw the memory pass behind Eva's face and saw her decide not to reach for it. "It was Evan, wasn't it," Eva said quietly. "I should have said something. I knew. I think I always knew, and I just—I told myself it wasn't my business." "It wasn't anyone's business. That was the problem." "I could have made it mine." Eva pressed her lips together. "We told each other everything once. Do you remember? We used to sit on that wall and swear we'd never let the other one make a stupid decision." "We made a lot of stupid decisions on that wall." "Different kind of stupid." Eva turned her glass between her fingers. "I rang you. After you'd gone. About a hundred times. The number was dead." "I got a new phone. New everything." Rory shrugged, but it cost her. "It wasn't about you, Eva. I had to cut all of it. The whole shape of who I'd been. He knew everyone I knew. I couldn't keep one thread, or he'd have pulled the whole thing toward him." Eva nodded slowly, and Rory watched the old guilt settle over her like the rain still drying on her shoulders. Seven years. They had been the kind of close that only children can manage, the kind that assumes it will last forever precisely because it has never had to survive anything. And then it had been asked to survive something, and it hadn't, and here they were—two strangers wearing the faces of two girls who had once believed they would grow old next door to each other. "You look well, though," Eva offered. "You do. You look—steady." "I am, mostly." Rory was surprised to find it was true. "It's a small life. I deliver food. I drink Silas's whisky. I read books I never read at uni because nobody's making me. It's quiet. After everything, quiet felt like the most extravagant thing in the world." Eva looked at her for a long moment, and something moved across her smoothed-down face—a crack, Rory thought, in the lacquer. "I have a house," Eva said. "And a fiancé called Marcus who plays squash. And I cannot, for the life of me, remember the last time I felt steady." She laughed at herself, shook her head. "Listen to me. You've had a worse time than anyone and I'm sat here feeling sorry for myself." "It's not a competition," Rory said. "It never was. That's the thing nobody tells you. You can have the wall and the house and still lose the people who knew you on it." Outside the rain kept on, and the green light bled through the window onto the old maps, onto the dead spies smiling in their frames. Eva reached across the bar and laid her manicured hand over Rory's scarred one, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the years hadn't already said for them.