AI The rain had followed her home.
Rory shook it off at the door to The Raven's Nest, pushing through the heavy oak with her shoulder, her delivery bag still slung across her chest from the last Golden Empress run. The green neon sign above the entrance buzzed and flickered against the wet Soho pavement behind her, painting the puddles in brief, sickly light. Inside, it was warm and low and close the way it always was, the air smelling of lemon polish and old beer.
Silas was behind the bar. He hadn't looked up yet. He was wiping down a glass with methodical care, his silver signet ring catching the low light on his right hand, his grey-streaked auburn hair combed back from his face. Rory could see the slight unevenness in his stance, the weight he kept off his left leg, that old Prague injury that never quite let him stand straight for long.
"You missed last call," he said without raising his eyes. "You're late."
"Yu-Fei had a double order to Camden," she said. "Someone really wanted their sweet and sour pork at eleven pm in a thunderstorm."
He grunted. That was his way of saying he heard her. He set the glass down. "There's soup on."
Rory tugged the strap of the delivery bag over her head and let it thump onto the stool next to her. Her black hair was stuck to her neck in straight, wet ribbons, cut blunt at her shoulders. She pushed it back with her right hand, and as she did, the sleeve of her thin jacket rode up and bared the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, pale against her skin. She pulled the sleeve down quickly . Old habit.
It was then she noticed there was someone else at the bar.
The woman was at the far end, where the wall was covered in old maps of places that no longer existed in quite the same way. She was sitting with her back very straight on a bar stool that seemed too low for her. A good coat hung over the back of it, expensive wool, dark camel. Her blonde hair was pulled back into something sleek and severe. She was holding a gin and tonic that she had not drunk.
Rory froze with her hand still in her hair.
The woman turned her head at the same moment. Bright was not the right word. Her eyes were tired, lined at the corners where they hadn't been before, but Rory knew that face down to the gap between the front teeth that you only saw when she laughed hard.
"Eva?"
Eva Davies stood up too fast and the stool scraped hard against the floorboards. Silas looked up then, his hazel eyes moving between them, reading everything in an instant.
"Rory," Eva said. "Oh my god."
She didn't look like Eva. That was the first, stupid, obvious thought that took up all the space in Rory's head. The last time she had seen her, Eva had been nineteen , with half her head shaved and the other half dyed bottled green, wearing Rory's father's old suit jacket to her A-levels because she said it made her look like a barrister. They had sat on the roof of the school bike shed and smoked rolled cigarettes that made them cough and promised they would both get out of Cardiff if it killed them.
This woman was in pressed trousers. Her nails were neat. She had a small, expensive watch on. She looked like someone who worked in an office with glass walls.
"What are you doing here?" Rory said, and immediately wanted to take it back because it sounded like an accusation .
"I was looking for you," Eva said. She laughed, a short, nervous sound. "I mean, I was in London for work. I'm here for three days. Legal conference. I'm with a firm in Manchester now. And I remembered you said — well, you said you were above a bar in Soho. Silas's place. The Raven's Nest. I didn't think you'd actually still be — I didn't think I'd find it."
Rory's mouth was dry. Cool-headed, her flatmates at university used to call her, the one who kept her head when everyone else was spiraling , who could think her way out of a locked room. She felt no such thing now. Her heart was beating very fast against her ribs.
"You're looking well," Eva said.
"You changed your hair," Rory said.
Eva's hand went up self-consciously. "Yeah. Had to. You can't show up to client meetings looking like a bad Billie Joe Armstrong impression. Office dress code."
"You always said you'd rather die than work in an office."
"It's not that bad," Eva said quickly . Too quickly . "It's actually — it's good money. It's stable. They put me on track for partner. It was — I needed stable, after everything."
After everything meant after Rory left. After the shouting and the police and the night Rory had called her at three in the morning from a service station outside Bristol, her voice shredded to nothing, saying Evan wouldn't let her go home. After Eva had said, come to London, just come, my cousin knows someone with a flat, you can stay with me.
Rory had come. Eva had met her at Victoria with a suitcase and bought her chips and they had sat on the floor of a flat that smelled of damp and Rory had cried until she threw up. And then Eva had gotten that job in Manchester, and Rory had gotten the part-time delivery job, and then the flat above Silas's bar, and the calls had gotten shorter, and farther apart.
"I tried to call," Rory said.
"I know," Eva said. "I was shit. I was really shit at keeping in touch. I got — immersed. That's what Mum calls it. Immersed."
Silas moved quietly down the bar. His limp was more pronounced tonight, weather in the knee. He set a bowl of soup down in front of Rory's usual stool without her having to ask, and a fresh glass of water beside it. He didn't look at Eva, gave them privacy in the way of men who had spent their lives listening at doors.
"You didn't have to look for me," Rory said. She sat down finally, because standing made her feel too tall, too visible at five foot six in her wet delivery clothes. She wrapped her hands around the water glass. Her fingers were cold.
"I wanted to," Eva said. She didn't sit. She stood with her hands clenched around the strap of her bag. That bag was leather. Real leather. "I kept thinking about Cardiff. You remember Mr. Hughes's history class? When you argued that the Treaty of Versailles was technically illegal? You were fifteen. God, you were terrifying. You were going to be an actual barrister, Rory. Like your dad."
"Pre-law was a long time ago."
"Brendan must have been gutted when you dropped out."
The name landed badly. Rory felt her jaw lock.
"He got over it," she said.
Silence fell. The old photographs on the wall watched them, men in flat caps and women with waved hair who had probably also had arguments in this bar, years before it was called The Raven's Nest.
Eva exhaled. "I saw Jennifer. Your mum. Last month. In the market. She told me you'd gone off law completely . Delivery work?"
It wasn't judgmental, not exactly. It was worse. It was concerned , in that practical Welsh teacher voice that Rory knew from her childhood, from parents' evenings.
Rory looked down at her scar. "It's part-time. It pays rent. And I like it. I like knowing where I'm going. Yu-Fei's good to me."
"It's just—" Eva stopped herself, then started again. "You were the smartest person I knew. You still are. You could do anything. You don't have to be stuck."
Rory felt something hot and familiar flare behind her sternum. Quick out-of-the-box thinking, that was what the codex of her old life had said. Not stuck. Not trapped.
"I'm not stuck," she said, her voice level, cool-headed even when she didn't feel it. "I live upstairs. I work downstairs sometimes for Silas when he's short. I'm not in a flat with a man who checks my phone, Eva. That's not stuck. That's a fucking improvement."
Eva flinched. The expensive watch caught the light.
"I know," she whispered. "I know that. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"I know what you meant."
Silas coughed, a low sound that seemed to come from deep in his chest . He leaned against the bar, his right hand with the signet ring flat on the wood. "Rory," he said, not unkindly, "the bookshelf's sticking again. Cold's warped it. You want to give it a shove for me before you go up?"
It was a lie. The secret door behind the bookshelf never stuck. He was giving her an out, a minute to breathe in the hidden back room where he held his quiet meetings, where no one could see her.
Rory shook her head. "No. It's fine."
She looked at Eva properly then. Not the coat, not the hair, but her friend . The line between her eyebrows that hadn't been there at eighteen. The way she held herself like she was bracing .
"You look good," Rory said, and this time she meant it. "Stable looks good on you, Ev."
Eva's eyes filled, quick. "Christ. Don't."
"What?"
"Don't be nice. I came here feeling guilty and you're being nice and I can't — I left you here. I told you to come to London and then I just left you here to figure it out."
"You didn't leave me," Rory said. The words were small, precise. "You got a job. That's what we were supposed to do. Get out."
"I was supposed to get out with you."
They looked at each other across the bar that was too dim and too full of maps. The rain hit the windows in bursts. Somewhere above them, in the flat where Rory lived alone and liked it, a pipe clanged.
Eva reached out, hesitant, and touched the edge of Rory's sleeve, right above where the scar was. A brush. Nothing more.
"Can I — are you around tomorrow? For coffee? Actual coffee, not this —" She gestured at her untouched gin.
Rory thought about the delivery route tomorrow. She thought about the exam prep books she had started buying again, second-hand, not telling anyone, not even Silas, with her father's old notes in the margins. Brendan Carter's cramped barrister handwriting. She thought about how tired Eva looked, and how expensive her coat was, and how both things could be true at once.
"Yeah," she said. "I'm around. Come at ten. Before the lunch rush. Silas does terrible instant coffee but he pretends it's fancy."
Eva laughed then, really laughed, and Rory saw the gap between her teeth.
"Ten," Eva said. "Okay. Ten."
She picked up her good coat, her leather bag. At the door, she paused, her hand on the frame, and looked back at the bar, at the green neon bleeding light onto the wet street, at Rory on her stool with her soup going cold.
"I missed you," she said.
Rory nodded. The weight of time sat between them, heavy and unmoving, but not unkind.
"I missed you too," she said.