Run: 2026-09-02-01M1H5D7ANKVD9H9ATTGB6VJC6

The third deadbolt turned with the reluctance of an argument lost, and Eva's door swung open on a smell of cardamom drifting up from the curry house below and, standing in the stairwell's yellow light, the last person Rory had expected to see holding a paper bag of takeaway she hadn't ordered. "You're not the Chinese delivery," Eva said. "No," Rory said. "I'm the Chinese delivery. Golden Empress. Someone ordered chicken chow mein and then never came down to get it, so I thought I'd eat it myself, but then I remembered I don't like this person, so I brought it here instead." "That's stealing." "That's compounding interest on a forty-minute bike ride in the rain." Eva leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over the sleeves of an enormous jumper Rory recognized as having once been hers. Her hair was pinned up with what looked like two pencils. Behind her, Ptolemy sat on a stack of fluvial geomorphology, tail curled around his feet, watching the corridor with the flat accusation of a cat who had not been fed on time and blamed the universe. "You look terrible," Eva said. "You look like you haven't slept." "I've been translating a seventeenth-century cipher for sixty hours. That's different. That's productive terrible." Eva stepped back, holding the door wider. The offer was grudging and it was not an apology, but it was there. "You're dripping on the landing." Rory came in before either of them could think better of it. The flat hadn't changed. It never changed. Books in towers, scrolls fanned out on the sofa like a losing hand of cards, notes in Eva's cramped handwriting papering the walls around a map of somewhere Rory didn't want to look at too closely. She set the takeaway down on the only clear patch of table, beside a mug with a fossilized tea-bag still in it, and stood there with rain running off her jacket and nowhere to put her hands. "You could have called," Eva said. "You'd have not answered." "I'd have not answered for the first two days. Then I'd have answered." Eva closed the door, shot all three deadbolts with the practiced efficiency of someone who had once explained, in detail, exactly why three was the minimum. "Lucien gave me your address. After the thing at the docks, when you didn't— when nobody knew where you were. I made him." Rory turned. "You made Lucien Moreau give you information." "He respects me." "Nobody respects you, Eva. They tolerate you because you're useful and slightly frightening." "And yet." Eva peeled off her glasses, cleaned them on the jumper hem, put them back. She did this when she was buying time. She'd done it the night she'd told Rory to leave Evan, standing in a Cardiff kitchen with the radiator clanking and Rory's split lip still tasting of copper. "You went to the docks." "The docks were a job." "The docks were a suicide note with a bike lock on it. Silas told me. He tells me everything because he's a gossip and I give him free drinks I don't have the money for." Rory laughed — it came out wrong, too sharp. "You went to Silas' bar." "I go to the bar above which you live, Rory. There's a distinction, and the distinction is that I have never once knocked on your door, because you made it very clear that the door was closed." The rain ticked against the single window. Ptolemy descended from his book-pile, crossed the room with the unhurried insolence of his species, and wound around Rory's ankles. She bent and scratched behind his ears, grateful for something to do with her face. "I didn't close the door," she said. "I closed the conversation. There's a distinction." "Six months." "I know how long it's been." "Then say it." Eva's voice cracked on the second word, and she hated it visibly, jaw tightening. "Say why. Because I've been through it every way, and I keep arriving at the part where you came to my flat at three in the morning after the thing with Evan, and you slept on my sofa for a week, and then we were — us, whatever we were, and then I found one ledger entry too many, one too many, Rory, and I said so, and you looked at me like I'd slapped you, and then you were just gone. No door slammed. You just weren't there one morning." "It wasn't a slap." Rory straightened. Her wrist ached, the crescent scar catching on the wet cuff of her jacket the way it always did in cold weather. "It was worse. You were right." Eva went still. "You found a ledger entry too many because there was a ledger entry too many. I'd taken money off Lucien for information I promised you I'd never sell. About your translation. About the cipher." The words came out level, which took everything she had. "I needed cash after Evan wrecked my credit, and you had a thing everyone wanted, and I told myself it was just coordinates, just a location, that you'd never even need to know. And then you looked at me and asked, and I couldn't lie to you. So I left. Because I would rather you thought I was a coward than watch you realize what I was." The flat held its breath. Somewhere below, the curry house extractor fan rattled into life. "I knew," Eva said quietly. Rory looked up. "About the money. I've always known. Lucien has a tell — he's too polite when he's protecting someone, it's revolting. I worked it out within a fortnight. I said the thing about the ledger to see if you'd tell me, because I thought — I stupidly, romantically thought that after Evan, after everything, you'd trust me with the worst version of yourself." Eva's voice was very steady now, which was somehow worse than the crack. "And you ran. You made yourself the villain and fled, like you do. Like you did with Evan. Like you did with your dad and law school. You don't break things, Rory. You exit them." "That's not fair." "No. It's worse than fair. Fair would be easier to forgive." Rory's hands had curled into fists at her sides without her permission. "Why are you telling me this now? I came here to— I don't even know what I came here to do. Apologize. Eat your food. See your face. Mostly see your face, if I'm honest, and it's been a miserable forty minutes of bike ride because I rehearsed apologizing the whole way and you've just taken it apart in ninety seconds." "Yes," Eva said. "I'm very good at taking things apart. It's the putting back together I'm bad at." She crossed the room — three steps, the flat was that small — and stopped close enough that Rory could see the exhaustion bruised under her eyes, could smell old coffee and the lavender soap she still used, the one from the shop in Shoreditch that had closed years ago and that she hoarded like contraband. "Here's the thing. I'm still angry. I'm going to be angry for a while, probably, in the way I'm angry, which is to say I'll be polite and cite it in footnotes. But I sat in Silas' bar every Thursday for four months waiting for you to come home, and you never did, and eventually I understood that I was waiting for something I could have. So." "So," Rory said. "So the chow mein is getting cold, and I haven't eaten anything with a face in two days, and if you stand there dripping on my books much longer Ptolemy is going to file a complaint." Rory laughed — properly this time, helpless, wet at the edges. She shrugged off her jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, next to where Eva's coat always lived, and the scar on her wrist caught the lamplight and didn't ache. "Two forks," Eva said, already pulling them from a drawer. "One conversation. Your ledger entry, all of it, everything you sold him — and then we start putting things back together. Badly. But we start." "Badly I can do," Rory said, and sat down across from her, and for the first time in six months, neither of them was leaving.