Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GS1G6EB39G7T8TMWH8MB9K

Rain came at Old Compton Street sideways, and the green neon above The Raven's Nest bled across the wet glass like paint nobody had bothered to stir. Inside, the light sat low and amber. Rory had the end stool and the evening's delivery slips fanned in front of her, working figures into a ledger in pencil, squaring each slip into its pile when she finished with it. Behind the pumps, Silas turned a glass under a cloth, the silver signet on his right hand ticking against the rim with every pass. Old maps of Belfast and Prague hung beside black-and-white photographs of men in overcoats under foreign streetlamps. The radio muttered something with a trumpet in it. The door heaved open on a smell of wet asphalt. A woman came in shoulder-first, shaking rain off a camel coat, protecting the coat before herself. "Sit anywhere dry." Silas didn't look up. She took a stool three down from Rory and set her phone face-down on the bar. "Whatever gin you'd pour yourself." While he poured, she studied the wall. "Is that Soho? It can't be." "Nineteen sixty-eight." He slid the glass across. "The pub on the corner's a phone shop now." "Everything's a phone shop now." The gin went down and the vowels went down with it — flat, warm, Cardiff all over. Rory's pencil stopped. The woman glanced at the slips, the cash box, the neat columns of figures, then at the woman making them. "Sorry. This is going to sound mad. Did you go to Cardiff?" "Everyone's been to Cardiff." "Richmond Road. Number forty-one. The house with the ghost that fried onions at two in the morning." Rory turned on her stool. Eva Morgan had a city haircut now, and good boots, and laugh lines she hadn't earned at twenty-one. On her left ring finger sat a groove of pale skin where something had lived a long time and left. "Say something before I die of it." "Your coat costs more than my flat." Eva laughed the way she always had, head back, all of her in it, and crossed the three stools between them and took Rory's face in both cold hands and kissed her forehead and held on until Rory's arms did the rest without being asked. "You look—" "Different." "I was going to say like someone who counts things for a living." Eva dragged her stool close. "You've got ink on your jaw." "You've got rain in your ears." "Three and a half years, Rory Carter." "Three and four months." "You counted." "I count everything now." Silas came down the bar and topped Eva's glass without being told. Up close, his beard ran more grey than auburn, and the limp sat easy in his left leg, an old argument he'd lost in Prague. He went back to his cloth. The side door banged open. A kid in a crash helmet leaned in, dripping. "Laila — Yu-Fei says the Duke Street order's dying on its feet. Keys." Rory tossed them across the bar. "Tell him traffic." The kid vanished. Eva watched the space where he'd been. "Laila." "Work name. Laila delivers for the Golden Empress. Rory's on sabbatical." "Since when do you need a work name?" "Since I needed one." Eva sat with that like a stone she'd just been handed. Then her old trick of moving before a thing could settle. "Singapore was flat, for the record. Everyone's rich and nothing's real. I'm back for good — chambers off Chancery Lane, a flat I don't own yet. I was meant to view one on Frith Street at seven." She checked her phone. "The agent's a no-show and the sky fell in, so." She raised the glass a half-inch to the room. "Lucky me." "Three weeks in London and you're two streets away?" "I was going to do it properly. A card. A text with an exclamation mark in it." Rory reached for the next slip. Her sleeve rode up, and the crescent scar on her left wrist caught the light. Eva caught the wrist. Her thumb moved over the scar the way you check for a pulse. "You kept it." "Kept what?" "Year Seven. Penarth Road. The chain went through your arm and you sat in my kitchen crying about the bike." "I loved that bike." "You cried for an hour." "The bike was new." Eva let go of the wrist. The letting go took longer than the holding had. She reached up instead and lifted a black strand of hair, let it fall. "You used to spend an hour on this. Straighteners. That oil that smelled like a garden centre." "Now it dries on a moped." "It suits you. That's the strange part." Eva turned her glass a quarter-turn on the wood. "I saw your dad's name in a law newsletter last month. Brendan Carter, still terrifying." "I wouldn't know." Something crossed Eva's face and she let it arrive before she spoke again. "I saw your mum in March. Tesco, Canton. First thing she asked was whether we'd fallen out." "And you said?" "I said no." A beat. "I lied. We hadn't fallen out. You'd gone quiet, and I didn't know what to call that, so I called it nothing. Then she asked if you were eating, and I said yes to that as well." Rory squared the slips against the bar. They were already square. "He's still in Cardiff, you know. The gym, of all the places in the world. He's smaller than I remember." "Don't spend your London on him." "I wasn't—" "You were going to ask if I hear from him." "No." Eva held her eyes. "I was going to ask if you're all right." "I'm all right." "You used to be a terrible liar." "I got better." Eva's laugh came out wrong, half its size. Rory's gaze dropped to the pale groove on her friend's finger, and Eva turned the hand over, studied it herself, and decided against hiding it. "Six years. Cardiff, then Singapore, long-distance, which is a way of saying neither of us meant it." She shrugged. "I did everything right, Rory. Chambers, the flat, the timing, all of it in the correct order. And I still ended up hiding from rain in a pub I've never set foot in, lying to your mum about whether you're eating." "I live upstairs." Eva blinked. "Here?" "Landlord's the one with the limp." Rory tipped her head toward Silas. "The pub's the honest part. It's the flat above it where I get complicated." Eva looked at the man wiping the same glass. "Does he know everything about you?" "He knows everything about everyone. It's cheaper than a telly." The door swung and a couple came in from the rain, and Rory's eyes went to them, weighed them, came back. Eva followed the glance. "You keep doing that." "Doing what." "Counting the room." "I told you. I count everything now." Eva nodded slowly, as if a bill had just been itemised. "I used to write you texts at two in the morning and delete them by three." "I kept your number. Migrated it through two phones. Like evidence." "Then why didn't you—" "Every time I picked it up I was somebody new that month." Rory said it to the ledger. "I kept waiting to have good news." "I never needed good news." "You told me to run, Eva. You made it sound brave." "It was." "It wasn't. It was the only door I could go through without being seen leaving." Rory turned the pencil over in her fingers. "You stayed. The staying was the brave thing. I've known it for three years and four months and I never once said it." "Don't hand me bravery. I gave you a key under a plant pot and a departure gate. A month, I said. Worst maths of my life." "The key worked. I slept on your sofa for two months and invented a person called Laila to keep it company." Both of them looked at their glasses. The trumpet on the radio found the rest of its band. Silas came down the bar with a bottle neither of them had ordered and two clean glasses. "On the house. Argue about it later." His eyes rested on Rory a beat past the words, hazel and unhurried, a man reading a room he'd read a thousand times. Then he limped back into the passage behind the bar, and somewhere past the shelves a lock turned, soft as a full stop. Eva pushed her empty aside and wrapped both hands around the fresh one. Rain ticked against the window in a thinner voice now. "Tell me," she said, turning the glass by its base. "From the beginning. The real one. Not the version you give your mother." Rory looked at the slips a moment. Then she lifted them, squared them one last time, slid them into the cash box, and turned on her stool to face her friend, her back to the door. "Get comfortable."