AI The rain had turned Soho slick and mean by the time Rory pushed through the door under the green neon. It buzzed above her, that familiar sour electric hum, throwing green across the wet pavement and the underside of her chin. She shook the water off her jacket and the smell came off with it, star anise and hot oil and cardboard, the ghost of the Golden Empress kitchen clinging to her sleeves after six hours running boxes up and down side streets.
Silas looked up from behind the bar. He moved the way he always moved, economical, favoring his left side just enough that you noticed it only if you knew to look . His left leg dragged a half beat behind the right when he came around to take her bag. The silver signet on his right hand caught the low light as he toweled a glass.
On a slow night like this the Raven's Nest settled into itself. Low lamps, the wood dark with polish, the walls crowded with what he never took down. Old maps with their coastlines gone soft at the folds. Black-and-white photographs of men in coats that didn't belong to this decade, women with set hair laughing at something out of frame. Someone had put Nina Simone on too low to properly hear.
Rory slid onto her usual stool and tucked her damp hair behind her ears. Straight and black to her shoulders, going frizzy at the ends from the rain. She pressed her palms flat to the bar to warm them and felt the pull of the small crescent on her left wrist, white now, thin as a nail moon. She'd gotten it when she was nine, falling off the wall behind the primary school in Whitchurch while Eva dared her to jump. Eva had cried harder than she had.
"You look drowned," Silas said. His hazel eyes creased. His beard, grey shot through the auburn, was trimmed neat as always.
"Delivery glamour," she said. "Yu-Fei says if I keep taking the Berwick Street route in the rain she's docking my tips for mop usage."
He set a half of pale ale down without her asking and went back to his glass. That was the arrangement. She lived upstairs, in the flat with the slant ceiling and the kettle that screamed, and she paid part of her rent in quiet company on slow nights and an extra pair of hands when the rugby was on.
The door opened and let in a gust of wet air and traffic noise. Rory didn't turn at first. Then Silas's hand stilled on the glass, just for a second, and something in his stillness made her look .
The woman at the door was shaking out an umbrella. Smart wool coat, dark, cut well but worn at the cuffs. Hair pulled back severe, blonde going darker at the roots. She was too thin. That was Rory's first thought, uncharitable and immediate, before the face resolved itself.
Eva.
Not the Eva from the photographs Rory still had buried in her phone. Not the girl with the heavy eyeliner and the laugh that took over a room, who could talk a bouncer into letting two seventeen-year-olds from Cardiff into a club in town and then talk them out of trouble after. This Eva's mouth was different. Set. Older than twenty-six had any right to look . Her eyes swept the bar, the maps, the photographs, and landed on Rory.
For a moment neither of them moved.
"Oh, Christ," Eva said. And then she laughed, a short startled sound that wasn't quite her laugh . "Rory?"
Rory stood so fast her stool scraped. Her heart was doing something stupid and loud against her ribs. Four years. No, more. She tried to do the arithmetic and failed. They had grown up two streets apart, shared a bedroom wall of secrets through secondary school, and then Eva had gone to London at eighteen with a suitcase and an audition and a promise to call every Sunday. The calls had thinned. Rory had stayed because her father, Brendan, with his barrister's voice that could strip paint, had said Pre-Law at Cardiff was the sensible thing, and her mother, Jennifer, marking essays at the kitchen table, had said, love, keep your options open. So Rory had kept them open until they closed around her anyway, until Evan, until that last winter when she'd rung the one number she still knew by heart.
Come here, Eva had said. Just come. My sofa's shit but it's yours.
Rory had come. Eva had worked nights and then not been there at all and then been somewhere else entirely, and Rory had ended up here, above a Soho bar that smelled of lemon oil and old smoke, running deliveries for Yu-Fei Cheung because Yu-Fei didn't ask for references, only whether she could ride a bike in traffic and keep the soup upright.
They hadn't been in the same room in four years.
"You look —" Eva started, coming forward. "God, you look exactly the same."
Rory wanted to laugh. She felt rain-sodden and seventeen and thirty all at once. "I don't. You don't. Sit down?"
Eva sat. She ordered a lime and soda when Silas came over, and Rory filed that away with a small jolt. The old Eva would have ordered something that came with a little umbrella and a story. Silas nodded, his limp barely audible on the boards as he fetched it, and left them a careful privacy.
"You live here?" Eva asked, nodding at the ease with which Silas had put Rory's drink down, at the bag stowed behind the bar.
"Above. Flat upstairs." Rory wrapped her hands around her glass. Her eyes, that bright blue her mother always said came from her grandmother Ellis, felt too wide open. "I work for the Golden Empress down on Lisle Street. Deliveries."
Eva nodded too quickly . "That's good. That's— I mean, are you still— did you finish? Law?"
"No." The word came out flat. "I left after second year. After Cardiff. After everything."
A silence pooled between them. On the wall behind Eva a map of the Bristol Channel curled at one corner. Rory could hear the rain needling the windows.
"I thought about writing," Eva said. "After you got here. I was— I was a mess then. I wasn't good to be around. I thought you'd be better off without me moping all over you."
"You weren't around to be anything," Rory said before she could soften it. She heard her father's cadence in herself and hated it. Cool-headed, people called her. Quick thinking. Right now her thoughts were coming too quick and none of them good. "You told me to come and then you vanished."
Eva's fingers tightened around her glass. "I know."
"I slept on your floor for three nights listening to you throw up through the bathroom door and then you were gone to Manchester with that guy with the van. You didn't even leave a note."
"I left money."
"You left eight pounds and a broken kettle."
Eva flinched. She looked down, and Rory saw how her collarbones stood out under her shirt, how her hands shook just slightly when she lifted her drink. The change wasn't just weight or clothes. It was as if someone had turned the volume down inside her . The girl who had once dared Rory to jump off a wall and then howled with guilt was gone , replaced by this careful woman who measured every word.
"I'm sober now," Eva said quietly. "Fourteen months. I did the meetings in a church basement off the Holloway Road where the radiators clanked. I got a job doing front of house for a theatre company. It's not acting. It's rotas and lost tickets. But I'm— I'm trying to be a person who stays."
Rory swallowed. The anger that had kept her warm for a minute guttered out, leaving something sadder. "I'm glad," she said, and meant it, and hated how insufficient it sounded.
"I saw your mum," Eva said. "Christmas. She came up for the market. She said you're doing all right. She said the bar man looks after you."
"Silas does." Rory glanced toward him. He was resolutely polishing , giving them the room. "He's good that way. Quiet. He doesn't ask for the whole story."
Eva followed her gaze, then looked back. Her eyes filled. "I was supposed to look after you. That was the job. Since we were kids. You were the clever one, the one who actually thought before she leapt, and I was supposed to make sure nobody—" She stopped. They both knew the name that would come next. They both left it unsaid. Evan's shadow sat at the table with them anyway, familiar and unwanted.
"You couldn't have stopped that," Rory said. Her voice was steadier than she felt. She turned her left wrist on the bar, half unconsciously, the crescent scar catching the light. Eva's eyes dropped to it and she gave a wet, startled laugh.
"God, the wall," she whispered.
"You cried more than me."
"You needed three stitches and you didn't even cry. Mum said you just asked if you could still go swimming."
They smiled at each other then, real smiles, brief as sun through cloud. Time folded, just for a second, and they were nine again, invincible and scraped-kneed, before Cardiff and Pre-Law and men and London had done what they'd done.
Then it unfolded again. Eva wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," she said. "For not being here. For being shit when you needed me not to be shit."
Rory wanted to say it was fine. The easy lie sat on her tongue. Instead she said, "I missed you." It was truer and harder. "I kept thinking if we'd stayed who we were, it would have been simpler."
"We were kids," Eva said. "We didn't know anything."
"No," Rory said. She finished her ale. The malt sat warm in her stomach . "But we thought we did. That's the worst bit."
Outside the rain eased. The green neon kept buzzing, patient and unlovely. Silas brought Eva another lime and soda without being asked and gave Rory's shoulder a brief, fatherly press of his ringed hand as he passed, an anchor. Rory leaned into it for a half second before straightening.
Eva was watching her, taking in the dry safety of this place, the way Rory belonged here. "You seem— settled," she said. There was something like grief in it, and envy, and relief all mixed.
"Most days," Rory said. She thought of the flat upstairs, the delivery bike locked in the alley, Yu-Fei shouting orders in rapid Cantonese and English, her mother calling on Sundays, her father's voice softer now on the phone than it had ever been in person. Not the life she'd planned. A life, anyway. "Are you around? Now?"
"Yeah," Eva said. "I'm in Kentish Town. For a while, at least. I'd— I'd like to see you. If you want. Properly. Coffee. No vanishing."
Rory nodded. She didn't promise. She didn't refuse. The weight sat between them, acknowledged at last, too heavy to lift in one night and too real to pretend wasn't there. She reached across the bar and touched Eva's wrist, lightly , where her own scar wasn't, and Eva covered her hand for a moment and squeezed hard.
"Stay for a bit?" Rory asked.
"Yeah," Eva said. "I can stay for a bit."