Run: 2026-05-31-01KSYXB98YEF5N8R3J67V9K34H

The green neon buzzed overhead, throwing a sickly wash across the wet pavement, and Rory almost walked past the door before she recognised the name. The Raven's Nest. She'd heard about it from someone at the restaurant, a place where the drinks came strong and nobody asked your business. That suited her fine tonight. She pushed inside and the warmth hit her, along with the low murmur of voices and the smell of old wood and spilled whisky. Maps on the walls. Photographs gone grey with age. She unzipped her jacket and made for the bar, then stopped. A woman sat on the third stool, hunched over a glass of something amber, and even from behind Rory knew the set of those shoulders. "Eva?" The woman turned. For a moment her face stayed blank, the practised blankness of someone who'd learned not to react too fast. Then it cracked. "Christ. Rory." They looked at each other across the gap of seven years. Eva had cut her hair short, the long brown waves Rory remembered shorn to something severe and businesslike. There were lines now at the corners of her mouth that hadn't been there in Cardiff. She wore a coat that cost more than Rory made in a month. "You look—" Rory started. "Don't." Eva laughed, but it came out thin. "I look knackered. Sit down before you say something we both have to pretend to mean." Rory took the stool beside her. The bartender, a tall older man with grey streaking his auburn hair, glanced over with quiet attention and then went back to polishing a glass, giving them room. "Same as her," Rory told him, nodding at Eva's drink. "You drink whisky now," said Eva. "When did that happen?" "Around the time everything else did." Eva turned her glass in slow circles on the bar. "I wrote to you. After London. You never wrote back." "I know." "You just dropped off. I told you to come, I sorted you a place to land, and then—nothing. Eva, you bloody saved my life, and then you ghosted me." She said it lightly, but the hurt underneath was old and worn smooth, the way a stone got smooth after years of water running over it. The drink arrived. Rory wrapped her hand around it. The crescent scar on her wrist caught the low light. "It wasn't about you," she said. "After Evan, I couldn't—I didn't want anyone who knew the old me. Anyone who'd look at me and still see the girl who let him do all that. You knew too much. It was easier to start clean." "Easier." Eva tasted the word like it had gone off. "You think it was easier for me, not knowing if you were alive? I rang the restaurant once. Some old woman answered, told me there was no Aurora working there, and hung up." "That'd be Yu-Fei. She vets everyone." Rory almost smiled. "I go by different names sometimes. Habit." "Different names." Eva shook her head. "Listen to you. You used to lose your mind if a lecturer spelled your surname wrong. Carter with an e, two minutes of indignation. Now you've got a stable of aliases." "People change." "Do they?" Eva drank. "Or do they just get better at hiding what didn't?" Rory let that sit. Outside, a bus hissed past, its lights smearing across the rain-streaked window. The bartender moved to the far end, suddenly very interested in the optics. "You changed," Rory said. "More than me. Last I saw you, you were doing your master's and living on instant noodles and righteous anger. What happened?" Eva's mouth tightened. "I grew up. I got a job. A good one. The anger doesn't pay rent, it turns out." "What's the job?" "Consultancy." She said it the way people said things they'd practised. "Risk assessment. Boring. Lucrative." "You hated lucrative. You used to give me a lecture about ethical employment every time I bought trainers." "And you used to think you'd be a barrister like your dad and hate every minute, and look at us." Eva spread her hands. "You're delivering noodles under a false name and I'm a sellout. We turned out exactly nothing like we planned." There it was, the thing they'd both been circling. Rory looked at her friend's face and saw, underneath the expensive haircut and the careful coat, the girl who'd driven through the night to pull her out of a flat in Cardiff with a black eye and no shoes. Who'd let her sleep on a sofa for three months and never once asked her to be grateful. "I never thanked you," Rory said. "Properly. For any of it." Eva went still. "No. You didn't." "I'm thanking you now. For whatever that's worth this late." "It's worth—" Eva stopped. Her eyes had gone bright and she blinked hard, looking away, towards the photographs on the wall as if they might offer something. "It's worth a lot. And nothing. Both. You can't bank a thank-you seven years late, Rory. It doesn't accrue interest." "I know." "You left a hole. That's the bit nobody tells you. When someone you love just walks out clean, they take a piece, and you carry the gap around for years and you stop telling people about it because it makes you sound mad." She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, quick, business-like. "I built a whole life around being someone who doesn't get left. You'd be amazed how much of who you are gets built on one bad thing." Rory thought of Evan. Of the version of herself that had loved him, defended him, made herself small enough to fit the box he kept her in. Of how every name she'd taken since had been a way of stepping further from that girl. "I do know," she said. "Actually." Eva looked at her then, really looked, and something passed between them, recognition, the kind you couldn't fake or earn back, just stumble into. "You been all right?" Eva asked. Quieter now. "Genuinely." "Some days." Rory turned her glass. "Some days I'm all right. Most days I'm just careful." "Careful." Eva nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's the one. We got careful." They drank in silence. The bartender, returning to wipe down the counter near them, set down a small dish of olives neither had ordered, and withdrew without a word, as though he understood the precise weight of what was happening and wanted only to keep it from collapsing. "I should've written back," Rory said. "Yeah. You should've." Eva turned to her, and for the first time the thin laugh became something real, something with warmth buried in it. "But you're here now. And I'm here. And I haven't got the faintest idea what to do with that." "Neither have I." "Good." Eva lifted her glass. "At least we're matched."