Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H57REH76XM1RJFP474HMZ8

The green neon above the door buzzed like a trapped wasp. Rory pushed through into the Nest, shaking rain off her jacket, and stopped dead two steps inside. Eva sat at the end of the bar. Not the Eva she'd left in Cardiff seven years ago—the one with bleached streaks and chipped blue nail polish and a laugh that carried across lecture halls. This woman wore grey. Grey coat, grey silk scarf, hair cropped short and dark as ink, hands wrapped around a tumbler with the patience of someone who'd ordered it twenty minutes ago and hadn't touched it. "Eva." "Aurora Carter." Eva turned on the stool, and for a second the old smile flickered through, the one from the night they'd climbed the crane over the Taff in second year. Then it settled into something smaller, more careful. "I heard you worked here. In the sense that I asked people." "Flattering." Rory slid onto the next stool. "Whisky?" "I'm going through a phase of drinking things I don't actually like. It feels adult." "Si. Two of whatever she's having." Silas set down the glass he'd been polishing and reached for the bottle. His limp dragged slightly as he turned, and Rory caught the way his eyes moved over Eva—coat, scarf, shoes—cataloguing without seeming to. They drank. The rain ticked against the window. A black-and-white photograph of Prague in winter hung between them, one Rory had passed a thousand times without looking at. "Seven years," Eva said. "Five and a half. I counted the first year, then stopped counting because it was depressing." "You didn't come to my mother's funeral." The sentence dropped flat between them like cutlery. Rory looked at her glass. "I didn't know." "I sent a card. To your dad's chambers." Eva turned the tumbler a quarter turn on the wood. "He forwarded nothing, then?" "No. But that's on me too. I stopped answering him. Evan—there was a period where anything from home felt dangerous. Information was leverage. I didn't know who'd read what." Rory's thumb found the crescent scar on her wrist and pressed. "That's not an excuse. It's a map of where I went missing." Eva studied her. "You're different." "Four years of looking over your shoulder will do that. You're different too. When did you stop laughing?" Something moved in Eva's face—brief, quickly covered. "When did you notice I had?" "Fair." Silas refilled their glasses without being asked and drifted to the far end of the bar, where a man in a flat cap had sat down with the air of someone wanting to be invisible. "I'm getting divorced," Eva said. "Two years of lawyers and it's finally the week of the signing. I came to London to be somewhere nobody knew me, and then I remembered there was one person who knew me, and she was here, and I hated her for three years and missed her for four." Rory laughed—a short, broken sound. "You've got the timeline better than I do." "Careers do that. You get very good at timelines." Eva touched the rim of her glass without drinking. "What happened to the girl who was going to tear down the whole legal establishment? I had you down for radical defence counsel by thirty. You'd have defended me for free and shouted at the judge." "I defended myself instead. It was a smaller case." Rory looked at the amber in her glass. "I do deliveries. Thai food, mostly. I live above a bar. And honestly? It's the first time in my life I've felt like the floor was solid." "You were the brilliant one." "You were the brave one. That's what nobody tells you—brilliant is just a trick, brave costs things." Rory reached out and put her hand over Eva's on the bar. The knuckles were cold. A ring was gone; there was a pale band of skin where it had lived. "I should have been there. I should have answered the card. I'm sorry. That's the whole speech." Eva's eyes were bright, and she blinked hard and laughed at herself. "God, you haven't lost it. That was exactly the speech I rehearsed you giving on the way over. Word for word." "Then you've known me longer than I've known me." They sat with that. Silas slid two glasses of water down the bar without a word, and Rory caught the corner of his mouth turning up as he turned away. "You live in Cardiff still?" Rory asked. "Richmond now. His idea. Everything was his idea, that turned out to be the problem." Eva finally took a proper drink, winced at the whisky, and smiled. "You said you deliver food. On a night like this?" "Somebody's got to bring the dumplings home." "Take me with you. Not—not home. Just with you. On the route. I want to watch you do something ordinary. I want to see the floor you're standing on." Eva's voice caught on the last word, and she smoothed it over with the grey scarf, pulling it loose from her neck. "I've spent five years standing on a very expensive floor in a very nice house and I never once felt it hold." "Si, I'm off the clock." Rory drained her glass and stood, holding out her hand. "Delivery for Richmond's finest. She doesn't tip, but she talks." Eva took her hand and came off the stool, and for a moment she was nineteen again, standing on the rail of a bridge over the Taff, shrieking with laughter while Rory held her wrist. Then the door opened, rain blew in, and the rain went out again with the two of them into the dark of Soho, one carrying the bag, one carrying everything else.