AI The rain had turned Soho slick and reflective, smearing the distinctive green neon sign of The Raven's Nest across the wet pavement outside. From her flat above, Rory could hear the low thrum of it, the buzz of the transformer that never quite settled. She'd come down the narrow staircase in her socks after her shift, intending only to return the insulated delivery bag to the kitchen and steal a glass of water, but the bar was quiet for a Thursday and the air down here was warmer than the flat.
She pushed through the heavy door in her Golden Empress windbreaker, the one with Yu-Fei Cheung's phoenix logo peeling at the shoulder, and the smell hit her first — old wood and lemon cleaner and the faint, perpetual damp of beer soaked into the floorboards. The walls were covered in what they always were, old maps with soft, foxed edges and black-and-white photographs of a London that no longer existed.
Silas was behind the bar, his grey-streaked auburn hair catching the low light. He moved with his usual economy, the slight limp in his left leg more pronounced at the end of a long night. He saw her and lifted his chin in greeting, the silver signet ring on his right hand glinting as he dried a glass.
"You've got a ghost at the bar," he said quietly .
Rory frowned, pulling the windbreaker tighter. Her straight black hair, shoulder-length and still damp from the ride home, stuck to the back of her neck. She followed his look .
A woman sat on the middle stool, her back to the door, a dark wool coat draped over the stool beside her as if to save it. She had blonde hair cut sharp to her jaw, and when she turned at the sound of the door, Rory felt the floor shift under her socks.
It was Eva.
For a second Rory didn't recognize her. The Eva she knew wore her hair long and tangled, wore men's shirts stolen from older brothers and laughed too loud in lecture halls. This Eva wore a charcoal dress that probably cost more than Rory made in a month of deliveries. Her makeup was precise. She'd lost the softness in her cheeks.
"Rory?" Eva said. Her voice was the same. That was the worst part.
Rory's hand went automatically to her left wrist, thumb finding the small crescent-shaped scar there, a habit from childhood. "Eva."
Eva slid off the stool. She was taller than Rory remembered, or maybe Rory was just smaller now, 5'6" in socks feeling suddenly defensive. Eva stepped forward and then stopped, as if unsure whether she was supposed to hug her.
"You live here?" Eva said, glancing up at the ceiling, then at Silas, then back at Rory's windbreaker.
"Above," Rory said. "I — yeah. I live above."
Silas set down his glass. His hazel eyes flicked between them and he understood, in the way he understood things without being told , that he should make himself scarce. He tapped the bar once with his knuckles and limped toward the back, toward the bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf. "I'll be in the office," he said. "Shout if you need anything, Aurora."
He only called her Aurora when he wanted to give her room to be someone else for a minute.
Eva watched him go. "Aurora again, huh? You let people call you that?"
"Only him," Rory said. "Everyone else still calls me Rory."
"Rory," Eva repeated, tasting it. She smiled, and for a moment the old Eva broke through — the wide, slightly crooked front tooth. "God. Look at you. Bright blue eyes still going to get you in trouble."
"You cut your hair," Rory said. It sounded stupid as soon as she said it.
Eva touched it self-consciously. "Yeah. Four years ago? Feels longer. You kept yours."
Rory didn't know what to do with her hands. She shoved them into the pockets of the windbreaker. "What are you doing in London? In Soho? In this bar?"
"I had a work dinner near Tottenham Court Road," Eva said. She gestured vaguely toward the street, toward the rain. "I was walking to the tube and I saw the sign. The green one. I remembered you texted me a picture of it when you first moved. Said your landlord had a bar that looked like an Indiana Jones set." She laughed, a short, nervous sound. "I thought — no way. But I looked in the window and there you were, on the stairs."
Rory remembered sending that picture . She'd been twenty-one, fresh off the train from Cardiff, still flinching when her phone buzzed. She'd left her Pre-Law course mid-term, left her parents' house — Brendan with his barrister's logic and Jennifer with her teacher's worry — without much of a plan, because Eva had said, come to London, you can crash with me until you get on your feet. Eva had been the one who paid for the bus ticket. Eva had been the one who sat with her while she blocked Evan's number.
"You never answered my last messages," Eva said, and the smile faded .
The bar was too quiet. Someone had left a half-finished pint sweating on a table near the maps.
"I know ," Rory said.
"You just disappeared. I woke up and you were gone . You left the key on the table. I thought —" Eva stopped herself, looked down at her hands. Her nails were done, a pale, flawless nude. "I thought something had happened. I called you for weeks."
Rory felt her throat get tight. Cool-headed, that was what people called her, but it had always been a thin crust over panic. She could think quickly in a crisis, could reroute a delivery through three closed streets or talk a drunk customer down, but she had never been good at this kind of conversation, the kind where you had to stay still and let the regret catch up.
"I was ashamed," Rory said finally. It came out flat and honest. "You'd done so much. You got me out of Cardiff. You let me sleep on your sofa for two months. And then I — I couldn't get a job, I was moping around your flat, I went back to him once, remember? I called Evan. You found out."
Eva winced. "Rory."
"You told me not to. You were right. I just left before you could tell me to leave again. It felt easier to be alone than to be a disappointment."
Eva stared at her, bright eyes — not blue like Rory's, but a light, watery grey — suddenly wet. "You idiot," she whispered, but there was no heat in it. "I wasn't disappointed. I was scared . You're my oldest friend. Since primary. You think I cared if you were unemployed? My mum's still asking about you, you know . Jennifer texted me at Christmas asking if I'd heard from you."
Rory hadn't spoken to her mother properly in months. Short, dutiful calls. She thought of her father's voice, reasonable and disappointed in equal measure, asking about her return to Cardiff University that was never going to happen.
"I'm working now," Rory said, because she didn't know what else to offer. She tugged at the sleeve of the windbreaker. "Deliveries. For the Golden Empress on Old Compton. It's not Pre-Law, but -"
"It's good," Eva said quickly . "You look good. Really. Different, but good."
Different. Rory knew what she meant. The Rory from Cardiff had been anxious, eager to please, always with a textbook under her arm and Evan's hand on her elbow. This Rory, at twenty-five, was leaner, quieter, her bright blue eyes more watchful. She knew how to be invisible on a bike in traffic. She knew how to sit in a bar owned by a retired spy and feel safe.
"You look different too," Rory said.
"Yeah, well," Eva said, and laughed again, wiping at her eye before anything could fall. "Corporate law does that. Remember when we said we'd never be those people? Suits? I wear suits now. I bill by the hour."
"You wanted that, though," Rory said. "You always wanted London. The big firm."
"I wanted you to come with me," Eva said. "That was the plan, remember? Both of us, flat in Zone 2, taking the city. You were going to finish law. You were going to be brilliant. Better than me."
The weight of it settled between them, the whole unwritten life. Rory could see it clearly for a second — the two of them at twenty-two, drunk on cheap wine in Eva's student kitchen, mapping futures that had seemed inevitable .
Silas's bookshelf door clicked faintly as he came back, pretending he hadn't been listening. He carried two glasses of water and set them down on the bar, his signet ring catching the light. He didn't say anything, just nodded at Rory. A question.
Rory took the glass. Her hand shook slightly , the crescent scar pale against her wrist.
"Stay," Rory said to Eva. Her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be. "Just — for one drink. We don't have to fix everything tonight."
Eva looked at the glass, at Rory's face, at the old maps on the walls that had watched a thousand other conversations like this one. She pulled her coat off the stool beside her and sat down, finally.
"Okay," she said. "One drink."
Rory slipped onto the stool next to her, shoulders touching for the first time in four years, and felt the bar's warmth settle around them both. Outside, the green neon kept buzzing against the rain.