Run: 2026-06-01-01KT1GC6HJFZH2PM61KN8FHNEQ

The green neon hummed above the door of The Raven's Nest, throwing a sickly wash across the wet pavement. Aurora ducked inside, shaking rain from her jacket, the dregs of a delivery shift still clinging to her in the smell of fried garlic and cardboard. She wanted one drink. One drink and the stairs to her flat above. She didn't notice the woman at the end of the bar until she'd already sat down. "Rory?" The voice did something to the back of her neck before her brain caught up. She turned. The woman two stools down had her hand wrapped around a glass of something amber, untouched, the ice gone to slivers. Cropped blonde hair now, where there'd been a long brown plait. A tailored coat. Lines around the mouth that hadn't been there at twenty. "Eva." "God." Eva laughed, and the laugh broke halfway. "I wasn't sure. You've gone dark." "Dyed it." Aurora touched her own hair as if checking it was still attached. "Years ago." Silas drifted over with the slow, deliberate weight of a man who heard everything and acknowledged nothing. He set a glass in front of Aurora without asking. House red. He'd learned her order in the first week and never once got it wrong. "You two know each other," he said. Not a question. "From a long time ago." Eva's eyes hadn't left Aurora's face. "Cardiff." Silas nodded once and withdrew to the far end, polishing a glass that didn't need it, close enough to pour, far enough to pretend he wasn't listening. Aurora wrapped both hands around the wine. "You look different." "So do you. You look—" Eva stopped, started again. "You look like you've been somewhere." "I've been here. London. Soho." She gestured at the bar, the maps yellowing on the walls, the dim brass lamps. "For a while now." "I wrote to you. After you left." Eva turned her glass a quarter-turn on the bar. "After Cardiff. I didn't have an address, just the old email. It bounced back." "I closed it." "You closed everything." There it was. The thing under the surface, breaking through fast, the way it always had with Eva, who'd never learned the art of letting a thing sit. Aurora drank. The wine was warm and slightly sour and exactly what she expected. "You told me to leave," Aurora said. "That's the thing people forget. You're the one who put me on the train." "I told you to leave him." Eva's voice dropped. "Evan. I didn't tell you to vanish off the face of the earth. There's a difference, Rory. I waved you off at the platform thinking I'd see you that Christmas." Aurora looked at the ranked bottles behind the bar, the way the light moved through them. Eight years compressed into a glass of cheap red and the smell of someone else's rain. "It wasn't clean," she said. "Leaving. You don't leave a man like that clean. There's a tail. You cut everything or you cut nothing." "And so you cut me." "I cut everyone." She finally turned to look at her friend properly. The girl who'd hauled her out of a flat at two in the morning with a split lip and a bag half-packed. Who'd driven her to the station with the heater broken, both of them in coats, breath fogging. "It wasn't personal. That's the awful part. There was nothing personal left in me to cut with." Eva absorbed this. She'd come up softer in some ways and harder in others; Aurora could see it in the set of her jaw, the expensive coat, the wedding band she kept turning round and round. "I got married," Eva said. "I can see." "Two kids. A house in Bristol with a garden the size of a beermat." A small laugh, this one real. "Mortgage that'll outlive me. I do marketing. Can you believe it? Me. I sit in meetings and I say words like *engagement* and *funnel* and nobody laughs because they all believe in it." "You wanted to be a journalist." "I wanted a lot of things." Eva's smile thinned. "You wanted to be a barrister." "No." Aurora shook her head. "My father wanted me to be a barrister. I wanted to be anywhere he wasn't. Turns out I got that." The silence stretched. Somewhere behind the bar Silas turned a page of the newspaper he wasn't reading. "What do you do now?" Eva asked. "If not law." "I deliver food." She watched Eva's face for the flinch and there it was, quick, suppressed, the recalibration. "Chinese. There's a restaurant down the road. Golden Empress. I take the bag, I ride the bike, I knock on doors. People don't look at you. It's restful, not being looked at." "Rory." Eva set her glass down. "You were the cleverest person I ever met. You used to take apart arguments like they were— you used to win things just by talking." "I know what I used to be." "Then what happened?" Aurora considered the question. The honest answer was a corridor of years she didn't want to walk down with the lights on. The flat in Cardiff. The slow erosion, the way Evan had taken her in pieces so small she hadn't noticed any single one going until she looked in the mirror and there was nothing recognisable left. The train. The bedsits. The slow accretion of a smaller life, built deliberately low to the ground so nothing could knock it over. "I got tired," she said. "Of being the cleverest person in the room. Clever didn't save me from anything. Clever just meant I understood exactly what was happening to me while it happened." Eva's eyes went bright. She blinked it back, hard, the way she always had. "I should have come after you," she said. "I keep thinking that. I had your sister's number for a while. I never rang it. I told myself you'd surface when you were ready, and then a year went, and then it got embarrassing, the not-ringing, and then it just became— the way things were." "You don't owe me a chase, Eva." "I owe you a Christmas. I owe you about eight of them." Aurora found, to her irritation, that her throat had closed. She drank to clear it. Silas, without looking up, slid the bottle a few inches closer along the bar, and that small mercy almost undid her more than anything Eva had said. "You found me anyway," she managed. "Quite by accident." "My train's delayed. I saw the green sign. I thought— a quiet drink." Eva laughed, wet and astonished. "Eight years. And it's a delayed train at Paddington that does it." "That's London for you." Aurora turned her stool to face her fully now, the wine warming her hands. "Tell me about the kids. The beermat garden. All of it. I've got nowhere to be and the rain's not stopping."