Run: 2026-07-01-01KWE9730YKCD1E3Q0ZFCDENC4

The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the pavement outside still held its sheen, catching the green neon of the Raven's Nest sign in long, wavering stripes. Rory sat at the far end of the bar with a whisky she wasn't really drinking, watching Silas polish the same glass he'd been polishing for the last ten minutes, his hazel eyes distant in that particular way that meant he was listening to something other than the low murmur of the jukebox. She'd had a long day. Three deliveries had gone cold before she reached the doors, Mrs. Cheung had docked her for it without asking why, and her knees ached from the stairs in that building on Wardour Street that never seemed to have a working lift. The whisky was meant to smooth all of that down to something bearable. It was doing an adequate job. The door opened, and the bell above it gave its small brass complaint, and Rory didn't look up—not until the voice hit her, low and amused, unmistakably itself even after all this time. "Well, if it isn't Aurora Carter, slumming it in Soho." She turned on the stool too fast, nearly upending the whisky, and there was Eva. Not the Eva of memory—not the girl with the gap in her front teeth who used to climb out of her bedroom window in Cardiff to smoke on the flat roof of the garage, who once talked their way past a bouncer with nothing but sheer nerve and a borrowed ID that didn't even look like either of them. This Eva wore a coat that cost more than Rory's monthly rent, and her hair, once a wild reddish tangle, had been cut into something sharp and precise, the kind of style that required upkeep, required money, required a version of a life Rory didn't recognize. "Eva." The name came out smaller than she meant it to. "God. Eva." "Don't sound so thrilled," Eva said, but she was smiling, and for a second—just a second—there was something of the old face underneath the new one, like a photograph held up to a light. She slid onto the stool beside Rory without waiting for an invitation, the way she always had, and Silas appeared without being summoned, setting a napkin down in front of her with the quiet efficiency of a man who noticed everything and asked about nothing. "Whatever the lady's having," Eva said, nodding at Rory's glass, "and whatever the lady wants after that." Silas's eyes flicked to Rory—a small question—and she gave the faintest nod. He moved off to pour. "I didn't know you were back," Rory said, once the silence had stretched a beat too long. "In London, I mean. Last I heard—" She stopped herself. Last she'd heard had been over a year ago, a text message that trailed off unanswered, and before that, a stretch of silence long enough that she'd stopped counting the months. "Last you heard, I was in Geneva," Eva said, saving her the trouble. "And before that, Zurich. And before that, some godforsaken conference centre outside Brussels that I'm fairly sure was actually purgatory." She said it lightly, the practiced lightness of someone who has learned to make her life sound like an anecdote rather than a series of doors closing behind her. "Turns out I'm quite good at making rich men feel like their money is safe. Who'd have thought." "You hated banking," Rory said. "You used to say you'd rather set yourself on fire." "I did say that." Eva accepted the drink from Silas with a murmur of thanks, didn't look at it. "I said a lot of things, Rory. We both did." There it was—the first small blade, slipped in so gently it took a moment to feel the cut. Rory turned her glass a quarter turn on the bar, watching the light move through the whisky. "I texted you," she said. "After I left Evan. After Eva—after you told me to come to London. I texted you for months." "I know." "You just stopped answering." Eva was quiet for a moment, and in that quiet, Rory saw it: not indifference, but something closer to exhaustion, a tiredness that lived somewhere behind the eyes and didn't have anything to do with the hour. The girl who used to climb out of windows had learned, somewhere along the way, to close them instead. "I was drowning," Eva said finally. "Not the way you were drowning—not like that, Rory, I know it wasn't the same—but I was drowning in my own particular water, and I didn't have anything left over to give you. You needed someone solid and I was coming apart at the seams in a flat in Canary Wharf that I couldn't afford, and I thought—" She stopped, exhaled through her nose, a short humourless laugh. "I thought it would be kinder not to hand you something broken." "I would have taken broken," Rory said quietly. "That's what friends are for. You told me that once. On the garage roof, actually. You said, whatever else happens, we don't let each other drown alone." "I remember." Eva looked at her, and for the first time since she'd walked in, the composure slipped entirely, just for a second, revealing something raw and young underneath all that expensive tailoring. "I remember everything, Rory. That's rather the problem." Silas, from the far end of the bar, was very carefully not listening, wiping down a surface that did not need wiping, and Rory was grateful for the fiction of his inattention. "You look well," Rory said, because the silence had become unbearable, and because it was, in its own way, true—Eva did look well, in the specific, exhausting manner of someone who had constructed wellness out of very expensive materials. "I look expensive," Eva corrected, not unkindly. "It's not the same thing. You look—" She studied Rory for a moment, taking in the delivery bag still slung over the back of the stool, the flour dust on her sleeve, the tiredness she probably wasn't hiding as well as she thought. "You look like yourself. Whatever's happened to you since Cardiff, you're still you. I don't know if I am, anymore." Rory didn't have an answer for that. Outside, the wet street went on gleaming under the neon, indifferent, and somewhere behind the bar Silas set down his cloth at last, and refilled both their glasses without being asked, as if he understood—better than either of them—that some conversations required more time than either woman currently believed they had.