Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPYMFFVABEJ8H2M8RTS721

The green neon buzzed like a trapped fly, and Rory took the last three steps down into the Raven's Nest with a paper bag of cold rice in her arms, because Silas had ordered dinner an hour ago and then forgotten he'd ordered it. That was the kind of thing she noticed now. Small failings of attention. She had grown into a person who kept a mental ledger of other people's forgetting. The bar was a Tuesday sort of empty. Two men at the far end arguing quietly about football, a woman with a paperback and a glass of red she wasn't drinking. The maps on the wall had curled a little more at the corners since spring, and the black-and-white photographs — Berlin, Vienna, someone's dead uncle on a fishing boat — hung crooked as ever. Silas was down the cellar. She could hear the thud of him wrestling a keg, and the particular grunt he made when his left knee reminded him of Prague. She set the bag on the bar, and that was when she saw the shoulders. She knew them before she knew anything else. That was the strange part, the part she'd think about later, lying awake above the bar with the neon staining her ceiling green. Not a face. Not a voice. A set of shoulders on a stool, hunched forward in that specific apologetic curve, as though the world were a low doorway you had to duck through. "Eva," she said. The shoulders went still. Then they turned, and it was and wasn't her. Eva Novak had been a wiry girl with bitten nails and a laugh like a car alarm. She'd had two coats her whole adolescence, one of them borrowed. The woman on the stool wore a coat that had cost more than Rory's flat deposit — proper wool, the kind that hangs. Her nails were the colour of oyster shell. Her hair had been cut by someone who'd been paid to think about it. She'd put on weight in the good way, the way that comes from eating three meals and sleeping through the night, and she had the smooth, expensive, unreadable face of a woman who had learned not to react. "Rory," Eva said. Neither of them moved for a moment. It should have been an embrace. Six years ago it would have been an embrace so immediate it would have knocked a glass over. "I heard you might—" Eva stopped, and started again. "Silas mentioned once that you'd landed here." "Did he." Rory came round behind the bar, because behind the bar was a place to be. She put her hands flat on the wood. "When was once?" "A while ago." "How long is a while?" Eva looked at her. There it was — a flicker of the old face, something rueful and quick, gone almost before it registered. "Three years, maybe." Rory nodded slowly. She reached for a glass she didn't need. "Three years. And here you are on a Tuesday." "I'm in London for work." Eva turned her glass by the base, a quarter turn, then another. "I've been in Singapore. Then Zurich. Then Singapore again. It's — there's a lot of Singapore." "Sounds glamorous." "It's airports." Rory found herself smiling, and hated that she was smiling, and smiled anyway. "You always said you'd get out." "I did say that." "You said it to me in a bus shelter in Grangetown at two in the morning with a chip fork in your hand." "God." Eva laughed — and it wasn't the car alarm. It had been sanded down into something appropriate, something you could bring to a dinner party. "I'd forgotten the chip fork." "I remember everything," Rory said. "It's a curse." She poured herself a soda water. She didn't drink much these days; she'd stopped around the time she'd stopped needing to soften the edges of herself for anyone. The bubbles went up the side of the glass and she watched them and did not look at Eva, who had been the only person who came for her, who had made the phone call, who had said *get on the train, Rory, just get on the bloody train* while Rory stood in a Cardiff hallway with her keys in her fist and a bruise coming up under her sleeve like weather. "You look well," Eva said, into the silence. "I look like a woman who delivers Chinese food for a living." "You look well." "I am well." She said it too fast. "I am, actually. I know it doesn't — I know how it sounds. But I sleep. I've got a flat upstairs. Yu-Fei feeds me. Silas is—" She gestured vaguely at the ceiling, the maps, the whole conspiratorial dimness of the place. "Silas is Silas. He teaches me things I didn't know I wanted to know." "Like what?" "Like how to tell when someone's lying about how long it's been." Eva took that on the chin. She had learned, somewhere between Singapore and Zurich, how to take things on the chin. The old Eva would have flared up, gone red, said something unforgivable and then apologised inside of ninety seconds. This one just sat with it, letting the sentence exist between them like a third person on a stool. "I didn't know what to say to you," Eva said at last. "That's the truth. I got the job, and then the job got bigger, and every month I didn't call made the next month harder. And after a while there wasn't a way in. What was I going to do, ring you up and say, *hello, sorry, I built a whole life without mentioning it?*" "Yes," Rory said. "That's exactly what you were going to do." "Well." Eva's mouth twitched. "It seemed rude." "You got me out of that house." Rory heard her own voice go quiet and flat, the way it went when she was holding something at arm's length. "You didn't have to do anything else, ever. That was the whole debt, paid in one go. But you don't get to disappear and then act like you were being polite about it." The football men laughed at something. The woman with the paperback turned a page. Below their feet, faintly, another keg thudded and Silas swore in Czech. Eva set her glass down. She looked at her own hands, at the shell-coloured nails, as though they belonged to someone she was still getting to know. "I thought you'd have gone back to law," she said. "So did my father." "He must be—" "He's a barrister. He's disappointed in a very articulate way." Rory shrugged. "It's fine. I stopped wanting to win arguments for money. Turns out I like driving in the rain and knowing every shortcut in Soho. Turns out I like being nobody in particular." "You were never nobody in particular." "No," Rory said. "But I used to be somebody I didn't like. That's worse." Eva nodded. And for a moment — the length of a held breath — the expensive stillness of her face broke open and there was the girl in the bus shelter under it, wet-haired and furious on someone else's behalf, seventeen years old and absolutely certain that love meant showing up. "I should have called," Eva said. "Yes." "I'm going to now. I'm going to be insufferable about it. Twice a week." "You'll manage once a month and feel terrible about it." "Probably." Eva picked up her glass again, and this time she drank. "Can I sit here a bit longer? I've got a car at eleven and nowhere I want to be." Rory looked at her — the coat, the hair, the six missing years lying between them on the bar like something neither of them wanted to be the one to pick up. "Sit," she said. "There's rice. It's cold, but there's rice."