AI The rain had turned Wardour Street slick and reflective, and the green neon sign above The Raven's Nest bled down into the puddles in a long, wavering smear. Rory stood under the awning with her helmet tucked under one arm, her delivery bag slung over her shoulder, keys cold in her hand. She was supposed to be done for the night. The last drop for Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress had been three streets over, a lukewarm container of dan dan noodles to a flat that smelled like wet laundry . Her shift was over, and she lived upstairs, and all she wanted was to get out of her damp jacket.
She pushed the door open and the bell jingled, and the warm, low-lit air of the bar folded around her. It was a Tuesday, which meant it was quiet. A couple hunched over pints in the corner. The old maps on the walls were curling at their edges. The black-and-white photographs — men in flat caps outside factories that no longer existed, a woman in a headscarf laughing on Greek Street in 1963 — stared down without judgment.
Silas was behind the bar, drying a glass. He didn't look up at first. He had his grey-streaked auburn hair pulled back tonight, his beard neatly trimmed, and when he turned his head the light caught the silver signet ring on his right hand.
"You forgot to lock the back door again," Rory said.
"Someone might steal my priceless collection of novelty coasters," he said, finally glancing up . His hazel eyes found her and then twitched past her, to the door she'd left open behind her. His expression shifted. Just a fraction. "Rory."
She turned.
A woman was standing in the doorway, half in, half out of the rain, holding a dead umbrella. Straight black hair plastered to her head. A dark wool coat that was too nice for Soho on a Tuesday in November.
For a second Rory thought her mind was misfiring from tiredness. The brain will do that. It will take the face of someone you knew at fourteen and graft it onto a stranger because you're cold and you're twenty-five and you're homesick in a way you won't admit.
"Eva?"
Eva Ellis — no, Eva Parry now, she'd taken her mother's name back after the divorce — blinked rain off her lashes. Her mouth opened. "Oh my god. Rory."
It wasn't a scream. It was quieter than that, and worse for it. Rory hadn't seen her in four years. Not since she'd bought a one-way ticket from Cardiff Bay station with two suitcases and a bruise on her collarbone shaped like a thumbprint, because Eva had said, come to London, I've got a couch, you can't stay with him. Evan used to joke that Rory's friends were dramatic. Evan had never liked Eva.
Eva stepped inside and let the door shut behind her. She was different. That was the stupid, obvious thing. The last time Rory had seen her, Eva had been nineteen and feral, hair dyed a furious red, wearing her father's oversized band t-shirts, loud in pubs, brilliant in that effortless way teachers would call wasted potential . Now her straight hair was shoulder-length and black and precise. Her makeup was immaculate. She wore small, expensive-looking earrings. She looked like a woman who worked in a gallery and had a mortgage.
"You cut your hair," Eva said at the same time Rory said, "You — your hair."
Rory laughed, a short, embarrassed sound. She was still in her Golden Empress windbreaker, the reflective strips cracked, her own straight shoulder-length black hair frizzing up from the rain. She pushed it back with her left hand and Eva's eyes tracked the movement, landing for half a second on the small crescent-shaped scar on Rory's left wrist. The old one, from when they were ten and tried to make a zip wire out of washing line.
"I live here," Rory said stupidly, gesturing up. "Above. The bar. I work — well. You know. Deliveries."
"I know," Eva said. "I Googled. I wasn't stalking you, I just —"
Silas set the glass down with a soft click. He moved around the bar with his slight limp, the old knee injury from Prague that actuary reports had never quite explained, and put a hand on Rory's shoulder. "Let me take your bag, love," he said, and the words were for her . "And your friend looks like she needs a towel."
Eva smiled at him. It was a practiced, adult smile. "Thanks."
Silas disappeared into the back, past the bookshelf that wasn't just a bookshelf — the hidden room he'd shown her once, walls lined with files, a hot plate and a shortwave radio. He left them standing there in the dim light of the old maps.
"You look..." Eva started, then stopped. "You look cool. You look exactly the same."
Rory knew she didn't. She knew what five years of Pre-Law at Cardiff University thrown away looked like . What leaving in the middle of her second year looked like , what having an Irish barrister father who stopped calling after you told him you weren't coming back for Christmas looked like , what having a Welsh teacher mother who sent worried texts full of ellipses looked like . "You look different," Rory said, honest because she couldn't think of a lie that would land.
Eva touched her neat hair. "Yeah. I grew up, I guess."
"You finished uni."
"I did. First in Lit. I'm at the Tate. Curatorial assistant, but still. It's — I'm going to do my MA next year. Brendan would have hated that."
The way she said Brendan, like she still knew him, like she still remembered Rory's dad holding forth at the kitchen table about case law while Jennifer tried to get them to eat peas. It knocked something loose in Rory's chest.
"You haven't been back," Eva said, and it wasn't an accusation, but it was close.
"I know."
"Mum asks about you. My mum, I mean. And Jen — your mum messaged me last month. She said you hadn't answered."
Rory's hands were starting to shake. She stuffed them into her pockets. The bar was too warm now. "I've been busy."
"Yeah," Eva said. She looked around the Nest, at the photographs, at the bar. "Busy delivering noodles in Soho and living above a bar. Very busy, Rory."
There it was. The old snap, the edge they'd had with each other since they were twelve and Eva had called her a swot for doing homework on a Friday.
"What do you want me to say?" Rory said, her voice low . "Sorry I didn't turn into a lawyer? Sorry I didn't stay and let Evan—" She caught herself. Silas was back, setting down two towels and two whiskies without being asked . He had that quiet authority around him that made people lower their voices.
Eva stared at the whisky. "I thought you were dead, for a bit. When you stopped replying. I thought he'd found you. Or you'd — I don't know. I thought a lot of things."
Rory's throat closed. She remembered the flat in Cathays, the way Evan would check her phone. The way she'd learned to keep messages short, then not at all. The way shame had been heavier than fear, after. How she'd told herself that disappearing was kinder than explaining why she was still with him.
"I'm sorry," Rory said, and this time she meant it. She reached out without thinking and her hand found Eva's wrist, bright blue eyes stinging. "I am. I was in a bad place. I — I didn't know how to talk to anyone who knew me before."
Eva didn't pull away. Her eyes were wet too. She didn't look polished anymore. She looked nineteen again, furious and scared in Rory's tiny Cardiff kitchen, saying, if you don't leave, I will never speak to you again. Which had been a lie.
"You were always the smart one," Eva whispered. "The out-of-the-box one. Do you remember when you got us out of being suspended for nicking Mr. Llewellyn's traffic cone? You told him it was a sociology experiment."
"He believed me," Rory said, watery .
"He fancied your mum."
They both laughed at the same time, a real laugh that burst out ugly and loud. Silas, at the bar, smiled into his own glass, his limp almost invisible when he leaned.
Eva wiped her face with the back of her hand, smudging mascara. "God, I missed you. You idiot."
"I missed you too," Rory said. She was still holding Eva's wrist, her thumb pressed over the memory of that zip wire scar. "Are you — can you stay? There's a chippy that won't poison us on Dean Street, if Silas ever closes this place."
"Is that your way of asking me to dinner?"
"It's my way of asking if you want to split chips and not talk about Cardiff for maybe one hour, and then talk about Cardiff for five hours after."
Eva picked up the whisky Silas had poured. "Deal. But you're paying. Since you live above a bar now, Ms. Landlady."
"I pay rent," Rory protested. "He charges me."
"I charge her half," Silas said mildly, polishing that same glass again.
Outside, the rain kept coming down on Wardour Street, turning the green neon sign into a river on the pavement. Inside, the bar had its same old maps, same old photographs, but the air had changed, just slightly , as if a window had been opened after a long time shut.