Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5CCMASTKJAM9TKBK81JAS

The green neon above the door buzzed like a wasp against the November drizzle. Rory ducked under it, shook rain from her jacket, and pushed into the warmth of the Raven's Nest. Ten hours of deliveries, three of them in a downpour, and her shoulder still ached where a moped mirror had clipped her near Oxford Circus. Silas looked up from the till and reached for a glass before she'd cleared the door. "You look like a drowned cat that lost a fight with a lawnmower." "Good to see you too." She dropped onto the end stool. "Whisky. The one you keep for people you actually like." "That narrows it to three bottles." He poured something amber into a tumbler the size of a fist. "Rough day?" "Rough decade. Just happens to be concentrated into today." The door swung open behind her, letting in a gust of cold air and saxophone from the street. Rory took a sip, and it was the burn of the whisky, not the voice from the doorway, that made her choke. "Rory?" She turned on the stool slowly, the way you turn toward a sound in an empty house. Eva stood just inside the entrance, wearing a charcoal coat that cost more than Rory's rent. Her hair, once a wild dark bob that Rory used to braid badly on sleepovers, was now sleek, pinned back, cut sharp as a folded letter. Gold at her ears. A thin scar—no, a crease, surgical and precise—along her jaw that hadn't existed when they were twenty-two. "Eva. God." Rory's hand found the bar to steady herself. "You look... grown up." "You look exactly the same." Eva crossed the floor, heels measuring out each step. "That's meant as a compliment. I'm not sure it lands as one." Silas set down a second glass without being asked. Eva slid onto the stool beside Rory, and for a moment they just looked at each other, the way you'd look at a photograph you'd half forgotten existed. "What are the odds," Rory said. "I've been in London four years. Four years, Eva." "I know where you've been. I've known the whole time." The whisky went cold in Rory's chest. "That's a strange thing to say to someone." "It's a strange life I've ended up in." Eva turned her glass a quarter-circle on the wood. "Is that man staring at us the landlord, or a problem?" "Both. Silas, this is Eva. We grew up sharing a wall in Cardiff. Her mum taught me to swear in Welsh." "Mrs. Pritchard's daughter." Silas nodded once. "She used to feed you both chips through the fence." Eva blinked. "That's... yes. Actually yes." "He collects facts like other people collect stamps," Rory said. "Don't encourage him." "I'll leave you to it." Silas moved down the bar, wiping glasses that were already clean, close enough to hear everything and pretending not to. Eva took a breath. Up close, Rory could see the cost under the polish—faint hollows beneath the cheekbones, hands that stayed very still, the way her eyes tracked the room in sweeps instead of resting anywhere. "You want to tell me why you've known where I've been for four years?" Rory said. "Because that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and none of it comforting." "Because I checked. When I got out." Eva's voice stayed level, but something moved behind it, water under ice. "I got out of what I was in, and the first thing I did was look you up. And there you were, in a photograph outside some restaurant, carrying bags of takeaway, laughing at someone off camera. And I thought—she got out too. She's fine. I don't need to drag her into whatever I've become." "So you watched from a distance for four years." "I was waiting until I was clean." "Of what?" Eva smiled, and for a second it was the old smile, the one that got them both thrown out of a cinema in Splott for laughing during the sad part. Then it folded away. "Does the name Meridian mean anything to you?" "No." "Good. That means I did my job." She drank, small and controlled. "I worked for them. Nine years. Diplomatic logistics, I told my mother. She told the neighbours I worked in shipping, which was closer to the truth than she knew. I moved things. People, mostly. Some of them deserved what happened when they arrived. Some of them—" Her hand tightened around the glass. "Some of them didn't, and I stopped asking which was which around year four, because asking made the work impossible, and not asking made me something I didn't recognise in the mirror." The bar seemed to contract around them. Rory set her whisky down. "Eva. Look at me." Eva looked. Up close her eyes were the same brown as always, but the light in them had been rearranged, tidy where it used to be chaotic. "I ran," Eva said. "Eleven months ago. They let me, which scares me more than a chase would have. And since then I've been rebuilding myself from the studs, and the first thing I wanted, the only thing I wanted, was to sit across from you and find out if any of me was still in there." She laughed, short and airless. "Some friend. Four years of surveillance and a debrief." "You knew about Evan." It wasn't a question. It arrived in Rory's mouth whole. "The years before London. You knew." "I knew." Eva's jaw worked. "I knew and I didn't call, because I was in Zurich holding a passport for a man who did to governments what Evan did to you, and I told myself I was in no position to save anyone. Do you know how that sounds now that I say it out loud? It sounds like a confession. It is a confession." Silas had drifted, without seeming to move, to the far end of the bar, polishing nothing. Rory reached out and took Eva's hand. The fingers were cold, and there was a callus on the index finger where Rory remembered a pen-callus from university, the same spot, some things surviving everything. "You sent me the money." "What?" "When I left Evan. Four hundred pounds, cash, in a birthday card with no return address. I thought it was my aunt." "It was me. I was in Riga at the time. The card took three weeks." Eva's voice cracked on the last word, the first fracture in all that polish. "I've done terrible things, Rory. I'm not going to list them, but I need you to know that I know. I'm not here asking for absolution. I'm here asking if there's a version of this where you let me buy you terrible wine and we talk about anything else for one night. Because I have spent eleven months being alone with it, and I would rather—" "Yes." Eva stopped. "Yes?" "Yes to all of it. Except the wine. Silas has a red that tastes like a campfire and costs more than my dignity, and you're buying." Rory squeezed her hand. "You're still in there. I could tell the second you walked in, because you ordered before sitting down and you sat facing the door." "That's habit." "That's Eva. She used to sit facing the door at Bob's chippy in case anyone from school came in and tried to take her scraps." Eva laughed then, wet and startled, and pressed her free hand over her eyes. "Ten quid says her mother still asks about you," Rory said, and reached for Silas' bottle.