Run: 2026-09-02-01M1GW3GN92CSB7BRXXTYE5E0B

The rain had owned Frith Street since four, and by twenty to eleven the pavement had turned to black glass, the Nest's green sign bleeding across every puddle in long ribbons. Rory shouldered through the side door with her delivery bag still breathing ginger and fryer oil, hung her wet jacket on the hook by the till, and held her hands up to the warmth like a woman surrendering. "Carter." Silas didn't look up from the glass he was polishing, though the cloth slowed around the rim and the silver signet on his right hand caught the light. "Kitchen's shut. I can offer you pickled onions and my sympathy." "Water. I've eaten my weight in salt and pepper squid for a man in Marylebone who tips in coppers." He slid a glass across. She took the stool under the till and cracked the surface tension of the water with one finger, and that was when she noticed the woman at the far end of the bar. Camel coat folded over the seat beside her. Dark hair cut clean at the jaw. A watch that caught the light every time she lifted her glass, and set it down again without drinking. "Ror." The name crossed the room before Rory could decide it was meant for someone else. Same voice. Lower. The Cardiff sanded off it. But she knew it the way she knew songs from two notes. Eva Llewellyn. The girl who had bleached stripes into her hair over a halls sink now wore it black and severe, and the old laugh lines had company — finer ones, drawn by something with less fun in it. "Christ on a bike." "Hello to you too." Eva came down the bar with her coat over her arm like it might be reclaimed. "I saw the green light from the corner and thought, that's a place that won't ask a woman questions at half ten." "It's Soho. Nobody asks questions. That's the whole economy." "Snakebite, then." Two fingers went up toward the optics. "Both of us. Blackcurrant in each." Rory stared. "You remembered that?" "I remember everything. It's the whole job." Silas built the drinks without comment and set them down. "On the house. The first snakebite in this establishment is a cultural service." He moved back toward the optics with the small hitch of a man whose left knee had withdrawn from the conversation, and made a show of counting bottles he had counted an hour ago. Eva wrapped both hands around her glass and didn't drink. Rory drank hers. The blackcurrant bloomed up through the lager, sweet and bruise-dark, and it was the union bar and mock results and the smell of a rented caravan all at once. "Who's the man with the pigeon?" Eva nodded at the wall of black-and-white photographs. "No idea. They came with the lease." "They're decent. Hung badly. Whoever put them up hung them to watch the door, not to be looked at." "You'll fit right in." "Three years." She let it sit. "Four." "It was three. You texted when I moved in here." "That was a text. Texts don't count. That's the whole point of them." "Then three years and a text." Eva's mouth did something between a smile and a wince. "Four since Porthcawl. Three since London. I've been counting both. I never told anyone the numbers." Her eyes went over Rory, over the bag slumped against the stool. "And you? Still delivering?" "For the Golden Empress. Chinese, off Tottenham Court Road. I live upstairs from here, actually." "Upstairs." Eva glanced at the ceiling, then at Silas's back. "Above a pub." "Above the landlord. The pub's downstairs and it's closed." "He looked at my hands when he took my card." "He looks at everyone's. He'll look at yours again on your way out. So tell me what you do that pays for the coat and teaches you to count like that." "Vetting. Due diligence. Somebody wants to buy somebody, I find out who they actually are before anyone signs." "Are they ever who they say they are?" "One in ten. It's why the money's good. People are mostly debts wearing suits." "And you like it." Eva turned her glass on its coaster, a degree at a time. "I'm good at it. That's not the same animal. I sit in car parks and I can tell a man's second phone by the way he holds the first one." A shrug. "You can get very good at the wrong thing, and the money doesn't care, and the years go into the till like everything else." Rory's eyes caught on the phone beside her friend's glass. Face down, and along its top edge, a strip of silver tape laid across the camera lens. "Your camera." "Hm?" "You used to take pictures of everything. Your mum's caravan. The chips. The seagull." "Porthcawl." "He bit you." "He bit everyone. It was his whole personality." Her thumb found the tape and pressed it flat. "The people I work for don't like cameras. Mine included. You stop noticing that you've stopped." Rory saw the watch again then. Heavy. Plain gold. Old Eva had never worn one; she'd called a watch a boss on your wrist. "You wear a watch." "I live in time zones. I like knowing what time it is everywhere I'm not." There was nowhere to put that, so Rory drank instead. Silas put fresh mats under their glasses without being asked, which in his language meant stay. "I used to rehearse this." Eva said it to the middle distance, past Rory's shoulder, at the maps of places neither of them had gone. "On planes. Every year. Sorry came out in different shapes. A postcard from Changi. Your favourite biscuits, which I never posted, because I'd lost your address, except I hadn't. I'd built a story where you were furious with me, because furious was easier than—" "Eva." "I should have come to Cardiff two years before I did." Ice settled somewhere behind the bar. The fridge hummed. "I saw your wrist at Hannah's wedding. You said bike chain, and I believed you, because I wanted to, because you'd have said anything with him in the room. And I stood there eating canapés for four more hours and told myself a bike story is a bike story." Rory's thumb went to the crescent on her left wrist. "It was the bike chain. You were there. Bute Street, the chain came off, you carried the bike all the way home and moaned about your shoulder for a week." Eva blinked, and something behind her face recalibrated. "I know. I know it was." A breath. "That's the worst of it, Ror. I've rewritten it so many times I can't find the real one under the guilt. There wasn't even anything to see. Not yet. It was just a room getting smaller, and me deciding I'd imagined the door." "I didn't call either." "You had reasons." "I stopped because I was tired of being the thing you'd rescued. Every call, I had to be grateful or brave or making progress, and mostly I was angry in a flat with a broken radiator. So I let it go quiet, and then the quiet was three years old and I didn't know how to break it without owning that I'd kept it." "It wasn't an intervention." "Eva. You rang me eleven times in a fortnight." Eva looked at her glass. "I was leaving too. The café. The flat over the chippy. My mum asking if I'd met a nice boy, like that was a career. I needed one person who'd take the exit with me so it wouldn't look like running." Her voice stayed level; her thumbnail had gone white against the glass. "You made it look noble. That was generous of you. It flattered us both and neither of us said so." Rory laughed — a short, surprised bark of it — and Eva's hand came up, two fingers covering her mouth. "You cover your mouth when you laugh." "Boardrooms." "You had the loudest laugh in Cardiff. You got us thrown out of lectures. Two of them." "Dr. Preece earned it. He printed 'Oral Carter' on the mock results, and you walked up in front of everyone and corrected it with his own red pen." "He left it on the desk. That's practically consent." "There she is." Eva's eyes were bright and her fingers stayed where they were. "I'm back, by the way. Properly. There's an office in London now, and a flat in Bermondsey with a washing machine and no soul. My walls are bare. Not a photograph. Living there is like living inside an alibi." "You hate it." "I sleep well in it, which worries me more." "Sunday." It was out of Rory's mouth before the fear could vote. "Lunch." "I work Sundays. Lunch shift. I deliver squid to people who eat squid at eleven." "Then you'll finish at four and I'll sit here until you do." Eva raised her voice down the bar. "Does the green light stay on late?" "Past sensible." Silas turned the glass under his cloth. Eva picked up her phone then, and with her thumbnail she peeled the silver tape from the lens. She folded the strip small, pressed the little roll flat to the bar top, and left it there like a coin she meant to come back for. "Hold still." "Eva—" "You never smiled properly when I asked. You smiled properly when you forgot I was asking." The phone came up. A click. No flash. She turned the screen around: two snakebites, the blackcurrant rising through the lager, and at the edge, blurred, the start of Rory's laugh. "For the wall." Then she lifted her glass and drank, and made the face of a nineteen-year-old.