Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPW9MEQH8YS1AZ546WHHKX

The green neon buzzed like a wasp trapped in glass, and Rory paused under it with the last delivery of the night going cold in the insulated bag against her hip. Sweet-and-sour pork, two orders of chow mein, a container of chili oil that Yu-Fei always slipped in for Silas because Silas had once told her his sinuses were the only part of him that still worked properly. Rain slicked the pavement into a mirror of the sign. Green light on black water, and Rory's own shape moving through it, distorted, unrecognisable. Inside, the Nest smelled like it always did — spilled bitter, old wood, the faint chalky ghost of the maps on the walls. Silas was down the far end with a cloth in his hand, polishing a glass that had probably been clean an hour ago. He looked up, and something crossed his face that Rory didn't have a name for, not right away. A flicker of warning, maybe. Or apology. She was three steps into the room before she saw why. The woman at the bar had her back to the door, but Rory would have known that spine anywhere. Straight as a ruler, shoulders set, the particular tilt of a head that had spent its adolescence being told to sit up. Except the hair was wrong. Eva had worn it long and brown and always a little wild, always with a hair tie on her wrist she was forever losing. This was cropped short and bleached almost white, and there was ink climbing out of the collar of her coat and up the back of her neck — something dark and geometric that hadn't been there the last time Rory had put her arms around her. Rory set the delivery bag down on the nearest table very carefully, as though it might go off. "Eva." The woman turned. And there it was — the face, the same wide mouth, the same slightly crooked left eyebrow that had been split by a swing set when they were nine. Older. Thinner. A silver hoop through the septum. Her eyes came up and caught Rory's and held them, and for one long second neither of them did anything at all. "Rory Carter," Eva said. Her voice had gone lower. Smoke, or years, or both. "Christ. Look at you." "Look at *me*?" "You've got a bag." Eva glanced at it. "You've got a work bag. You've got a *job*, Rory. In London." "I've got several." Rory came the rest of the way to the bar and stood beside her, and did not sit down. Her hands wanted somewhere to go. She put them in her jacket pockets. "You're back." "I'm passing." Eva turned her glass on the wood. Whiskey, neat, half gone. She'd hated whiskey. She'd once spat a mouthful of Rory's father's Jameson into a hedge in Roath Park and then been sick behind the boathouse. "Two nights, then Amsterdam." "Amsterdam." "There's a residency. Sort of. It's not really —" She stopped, and made a small movement with her hand that Rory recognised as the gesture of someone who had learned not to explain themselves. "It's a long story." Silas set a glass of red down in front of Rory without being asked and moved away down the bar to the far end, where a man was making a great show of reading the *Standard*. Rory was grateful for that. Silas had a gift for absence. "You didn't answer," Rory said. Eva didn't pretend not to understand. That, at least, was still her. "No." "Three years, Eva. I called you. I wrote you an actual letter, on paper, like a Victorian." "I know. It was a good letter." "So you got it." "I got it in Lisbon," Eva said. "In a hostel with a broken toilet and a Canadian bloke who played the harmonica badly. I read it four times and then I put it in the bottom of my bag and I carried it around for about eight months." She lifted her glass. "It's probably still in there somewhere. Under the sandals." Rory laughed. It came out wrong — too sharp, more air than sound. "That's meant to make it better." "No," Eva said. "It's just what happened." The rain picked up outside, thickening against the window, and the green of the sign smeared across it. Rory took the wine and drank more of it than she'd meant to. Her tongue found the tannin, the cheap sourness underneath. Silas kept a good cellar for his friends and a bad one for the bar, and she had never worked out which she'd just been given, which told her something about where she stood tonight. "You were the one who told me to come here," she said. "You know that? You sat on my parents' kitchen floor with a mug of tea and you said, *London, Rory. Come to London, I'll find you a room, we'll be terrible together.* And I did it. I actually did it. I packed a bag and I left everything and I got on the two-fifteen from Cardiff Central with your address in my phone." "And I'd gone." "And you'd gone." Eva nodded slowly, as if she were absorbing a piece of news rather than a fact she'd lived. "I got scared," she said. "Of what?" "Of you turning up." She turned on the stool then, fully, and looked at Rory head-on, and Rory saw for the first time how tired she was — the grey under the eyes, the small hard set of the jaw. "You were coming out of something horrible. You needed somebody steady. And I'd just worked out, about a week before, that I wasn't going to be steady. Not ever. Not the way you needed. And I thought — better she finds that out at a distance than in a flat with me, where she can't leave." "You didn't get to make that decision for me." "No," Eva agreed. "I didn't. I did it anyway." Rory looked down at the bar. Someone had carved *DL 1998* into the wood by the till, and the varnish had gone dark in the grooves. Twenty-odd years of elbows. She thought about the girl on the two-fifteen with the bag between her feet and a bruise she'd stopped explaining, and how that girl had got off at Paddington and stood on the concourse for forty minutes waiting for a phone that never lit up. She thought about how she had, in the end, walked. Found a room. Found Yu-Fei. Found the green sign and the man behind the bar with the signet ring and the bad knee who had asked her exactly no questions and given her exactly what she needed. "I'm all right, you know," she said. "I want you to know that. I didn't need you in the end." Eva flinched, very slightly, and Rory felt the ugly pleasure of it and then the shame of the pleasure, fast, one on top of the other. "Good," Eva said. "That's — good. I mean it." "You look like someone else." "So do you." Eva reached out, and for a moment Rory thought she was going to touch her face, but her fingers stopped at Rory's left wrist, where the sleeve had ridden up, and rested there — on the little crescent scar, white as a fingernail clipping, from the summer they'd both fallen off the same wall. "That's still there, though." "Yeah." Rory's throat had gone tight. "That's still there." Neither of them moved. Behind them the door opened and let in a gust of wet air and two men arguing about football, and Silas said something dry that made them laugh, and the room went on being a room. "I'm here till Thursday," Eva said at last, letting go. "That's all I've got. Thursday morning." Rory thought about the delivery going cold on the table. About the flat upstairs with its one good chair. About all the things she could say now, at this exact moment, that she would not be able to say on Thursday morning or ever again. "Then don't drink that," she said, and took the whiskey out of Eva's hand and set it down out of reach. "You always hated it. Sit there. I'll get you something you actually like." Eva's mouth did something complicated. "You remember what I like?" "Eva," Rory said. "I remember everything. That's the whole problem."