Run: 2026-07-25-01KYD4RY2B8NQVKNATMZKF92VX

The green buzzed before she heard it. Rory was coming down the back stairs from her flat with a plastic container of leftover rice from Golden Empress in one hand and her keys in the other, and the light from the Nest's sign bled through the narrow stairwell window in a flat, chemical wash. Green neon. It painted the damp brick and the railing in short pulses. She'd lived above Silas' bar for eight months now and she still hadn't gotten used to how it made everything look a little sick at night. The bar was in that in-between hour. Too late for the after-work crowd, too early for the midnight regulars. When she pushed through the service door by the kitchen, the place was dim the way it always was, low warm bulbs catching the edges of the old maps and the black-and-white photographs that covered every inch of wall. It smelled like lemon polish and spilt bitter. Silas was behind the bar. He moved with that slight hitch in his left leg, the one that got worse when it rained, stacking clean glasses with his big hands. His hair had gone more grey than auburn in the last year, pulled back, his beard trimmed close. The silver signet on his right hand caught the light whenever he turned a glass. He looked up when she came in. "You didn't have to come down," he said. "Yu-Fei gave me rice," she said, lifting the container. "It's going to grow legs if I leave it in the flat." He smiled a little. "Put it behind the bar. Save you from yourself." She was halfway across the room when she saw there was someone else at the bar. One person, sitting two stools down from where Silas kept his own stool for nights he wanted to sit and watch the place instead of working it. A woman in a charcoal wool coat even though it was warm in here, hair cut blunt at the jaw. The woman turned. Rory stopped. It was such a specific kind of stop, her body did it before her brain could authorize it. One foot in front of the other, keys biting into her palm. The woman's face opened in exactly the same delayed way, mouth parting, eyes widening. "Rory?" It was Eva. Not the Eva from Cardiff, who had worn the same battered Converse for three years straight and kept her hair dyed with cheap manic-panic that bled onto Rory's pillowcases. Eva Parry, who'd sat with her on the cold floor of her dorm bathroom at Cardiff Uni while Rory tried to figure out how to say out loud what Evan had done, who'd finally said, I have a cousin with a couch in London, just come, will you. This Eva wore a tailored coat. Her dark blonde hair was cut sharp and expensive. Her makeup was done. She looked - Rory fumbled for the word and disliked it as soon as she found it - finished. Put together in a way that made Rory suddenly, acutely aware of her own straight black hair pulled back messily at her shoulders, the faded delivery t-shirt for Golden Empress, the rice container sweating in her hand. "Holy shit," Eva said, and she actually laughed, a bright, incredulous sound that cracked in the middle. She slid off the barstool. "Aurora Carter. No fucking way." Rory set the rice down on the nearest table too carefully. "Ev." They collided halfway. Eva hugged hard and smelled like something clean and sandalwood that didn't belong to the girl Rory remembered, who'd smelled like roll-ups and cheap vanilla body spray. Over Eva's shoulder, Rory could see Silas watching with his quiet, assessing hazel eyes, saying nothing. He was good at that. "You live here now?" Eva pulled back and held her at arm's length. Her gaze snagged and held for a second too long on Rory's face, then dropped, flickered away. "I mean, obviously, you're here - Silas said someone lived upstairs but - " "You know Silas?" Rory asked. "Just tonight. I had a client dinner that went long and I was walking. I saw the sign." Eva gestured vaguely toward the street, toward the green neon. "I didn't know you still - I mean. That you were here." Time did a funny thing. Rory could feel it gathering in the space between them, thickening the air. She felt twenty again, then twelve, then twenty-five again and too old for all of it. "I've been here almost a year," she said. "In Soho. Above the bar. I work days." She touched automatically at her left wrist, thumb finding the small ridge of the crescent scar there. "How long has it been? Two years?" "Three," Eva said quickly. "Since you left." Since you left. Not since I saw you last. Rory had left Cardiff the week after final exams, on a National Express she'd paid for with tips from Golden Empress. Eva had been the one who'd bought her ticket, actually. Rory remembered it now. She'd wired her eighty quid and said pay me back never. "You look different," Rory said, because she couldn't find anything else to say that wouldn't open a trapdoor. Eva's smile tightened. "I should hope so. I bill three hundred an hour now. They make you look different." "You went ahead with the training contract." "I went ahead with everything." Eva said it lightly, but something flat slid behind her eyes. She looked Rory up and down, not unkindly, but appraising. "You're - you look the same. Exactly the same. Your eyes - God, I forgot how blue. Like freaky blue." Rory felt her shoulders come up. "Still five six in boots." "No, but - " Eva waved a hand. "You know. Still you. Cool as hell. Still solving a cold case in your head even when someone's talking to you." Silas, as if sensing the snag, set a glass down in front of Eva without her asking and a glass of water in front of Rory's usual spot. His limp was more pronounced tonight. He gave Rory a small look, the barest lift of his chin that meant I'm here, and then he retreated to the far end of the bar and started very deliberately wiping down the row of old photographs there, giving them room. Eva sat back down. Rory sat next to her because it would have been stranger not to. The barstool was warm from Eva's body. "So," Eva said, wrapping both hands around her glass. "Are you - did you go back to law? Are you at LSE or something?" "No," Rory said. "I didn't go back. I'm delivering food. Part-time. It's - it's good. It's quiet." Eva's face did something she tried to hide. A flicker. Pity, or surprise. "Oh." "I like it," Rory said, and it sounded defensive even to her. "I get to ride around all day. No one asks me anything." "That's good. That's - yeah, that sounds good." Eva nodded too fast. "I always thought you'd be the one. You were always smarter than all of us. Professor Davies said that paper you wrote on human rights - " "Eva." Eva stopped. Her fingers tightened on the glass. For a second she looked exactly like she had at eighteen, when she'd gotten drunk at a house party and cried about not getting into Cardiff on her first try. "I didn't mean - " Eva started. "It's fine." They sat with it. The bar hummed. Someone out on the street shouted. "What about you?" Rory asked, because it was easier to ask than to sit inside the regret that was already pooling. "Firm in London?" "Legal consultancy, near St. Paul's. Very grown up. Very boring. I wear blazers now." Eva plucked at her coat. "Mum's thrilled. She tells everyone my Welsh is paying off." She attempted a laugh. It didn't land. "I broke up with Tom." "Oh. I'm sorry." "No, you're not. You hated Tom." "I hated how he talked over you." "Same thing." Eva took a long drink. "I should have come to see you. When you moved. I - I was going to. I meant to. And then work - " "Don't," Rory said quietly. She wasn't angry, which was almost worse. Anger would have been a straight line. This was something messier. "You got me out. You called him and told him if he came near the house again you'd have your brother hit him with his car. Which, by the way, very illegal. The barrister's daughter." Eva let out a wet laugh. "It worked, though, didn't it?" "It did." Rory looked down at her own hands, at the chipped black polish, at the faint white crescent on her wrist. "I just - I thought you'd be the one person who didn't look at me like I'd thrown everything away." "I don't," Eva said, too fast, too loud. Then softer. "I don't, Rory. I swear. I just - God, I spent three years grinding for that contract, and every day I'm in that office feeling like I'm going to throw up from how much I hate it. And then I see you just... living. Above a bar. And you're calm. You've always been fucking calm. And I feel like shit because I'm jealous of you. That's sick, right? I'm jealous of you delivering noodles." Rory stared at her. The sharp blazer. The expensive haircut. The dark circles under her eyes that the makeup couldn't quite hide. It came together all at once. Eva hadn't changed into someone polished. She'd changed into someone armored. "They're really good noodles," Rory said eventually. That broke it. Eva snorted, then covered her mouth, then laughed for real this time, shoulders shaking. "Christ. You absolute dick." "You absolute dick," Rory echoed, and felt her own throat get tight. Eva knocked her knee against Rory's under the bar. Her eyes were bright. "Are you staying down here? Do you have to - can we get properly drunk? Like old times? Like that night before your interview when we stole that bottle of Brendan's whiskey?" Rory thought about the rice getting warm. Thought about the flat upstairs with its single window that looked out onto the fire escape and the green sign that buzzed all night. Thought about how she'd imagined this reunion a dozen times, always with some better version of herself. She reached over and picked up her water glass and clinked it against Eva's. "I'm here," she said. "I'm not going anywhere." Behind them, Silas turned up the music just a fraction, low jazz that filled the corners of the room where the maps curled at the edges, and left the bookshelf that hid his back room firmly closed.