AI The green neon of The Raven's Nest hummed against the damp Soho air and threw its color out onto the wet pavement. Rory stood under it for a second longer than she needed to, keys in hand, her delivery bag for the Golden Empress still slung over her shoulder and smelling faintly of chili oil and plastic. She lived upstairs, above the bar, and she had a habit of coming in through the front anyway, just to feel the change in temperature.
She pushed the door. Heat and low music and the particular smell of old wood polish came out to meet her. It was a Tuesday, early, and the place was thin. Two regulars at a table near the maps, a couple by the window who weren't talking . The walls were crowded as always with old maps, their coastlines foxed and faded, and black-and-white photographs of London that had nothing to do with each other except that Silas liked them.
Silas himself 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 barely noticeable until he had to pivot. He was wiping down a glass with a white cloth, the silver signet ring on his right hand knocking softly against it with every turn.
"You've got that look," he said without looking up . His hazel eyes flicked to her. "Long shift."
"Yu-Fei had me go all the way to Camden," Rory said. She shrugged the bag off and set it on the stool next to her. Her straight black hair, cut blunt at her shoulders, was damp at the ends from the drizzle. "One order. One soup. I think he just wanted me out of the kitchen."
"Sit. I'll pour you something that isn't soup."
She did. She pulled off her thin delivery jacket and draped it over the bag. Under the bar lights her eyes were bright blue, tired, and the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist showed pale against her skin when she pushed her sleeves up. She'd gotten it falling off a garden wall in Cardiff when she was nine. Eva had been there. Eva had been there for all of it.
Someone laughed at the far end of the bar. A woman's laugh, short and practiced.
Rory glanced down the bar and then looked again.
The woman sat with her back mostly to the room, perched on a stool with a kind of careful posture. Dark wool coat folded neatly on the stool beside her. Blonde hair, but not the warm, mousy blonde Rory remembered; this was cut sharp at the jaw, expensive. A glass of white wine in front of her, barely touched. When she turned her head to say something to Silas, Rory saw her profile and felt something drop in her chest like an elevator missing a floor.
"Eva?"
The woman turned fully then. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened, and for a half second Rory saw the old Eva in there, the girl who used to steal her father's barrister robes and wear them around the house in Cardiff pretending to be a judge.
"Rory?" Eva said. She slid off the stool. "Oh my god. Rory Carter."
Rory was already standing before she realized she'd decided to. Cool-headed was what people said about her, intelligent, quick, but her thoughts were not quick now. They were stuck on the fact that Eva Hughes was sitting in The Raven's Nest on a Tuesday in November.
Eva came toward her and hugged her. She smelled like perfume Rory didn't know and something clean and cold. Her coat had been Burberry, Rory realized. The hug was brief, shoulders only.
"What are you doing here?" Rory said. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. "I thought you were— you're in Clapham now, right? With..."
"With Mark, yeah," Eva said. She smiled, but the smile didn't go to her eyes the way it used to. There was a tightness around it. "We moved. Well. I moved. We're — it's complicated. I'm actually over near Farringdon now. For work."
Silas set a whisky down in front of Rory without being asked , and a fresh napkin. He gave Eva a look that was polite and assessing, the quiet authority he carried settling over the bar like a weight . Then he stepped away, giving them room, his limp soft against the mats behind the bar as he moved to the other end to give the couple their bill.
"You look..." Eva gestured vaguely, taking Rory in. "You look exactly the same. Shoulder-length, still doing that thing with your hair behind your ears. Still—" She nodded at Rory's wrist . "Still got the little moon."
Rory tucked her left hand around her glass self-consciously. "You don't," she said. Before she could stop herself, she added, "You look different."
Eva laughed again, that same short laugh. "That's one way to put it. City does that, doesn't it?"
It was more than the haircut. Eva had always been soft, round-faced, loud. She talked with her hands. She wore jumpers that were too big and left her socks mismatched on purpose. Now her nails were done in a dark, flawless gel. Her shirt was silk . She held her wine glass by the stem with two fingers like she'd been taught . Even her accent had thinned, the Cardiff edges filed down into something closer to London.
"You never answered my texts," Rory said. She hadn't meant to say it. It came out low. She stared at the whisky instead of at Eva.
Eva's face did something complicated. "I know. I know I didn't. I was— Rory, I was awful. I meant to call after you left Cardiff. After Evan."
The name landed between them on the bar. Evan. Rory felt her shoulders pull in on instinct.
"You told me to come to London," Rory said. She kept her voice even, cool-headed, the way she had learned to be when she needed to think around a problem instead of through it. "You said, get on the train, I've got a sofa, we'll figure it out. And then when I got here, you were... busy."
"I was busy," Eva said, too quickly . "I had just started at KPMG. I was working seventy-hour weeks. Mark and I were fighting. I couldn't— I didn't know how to help you with that. With him."
"You didn't have to help," Rory said. "You just had to pick up the phone."
Eva's fingers tightened on her glass. "I thought you were okay. Silas — you said Silas was looking out for you. That you'd got the flat. That you had the restaurant job. You sounded okay."
"I was not okay," Rory said. It was not loud. The two regulars didn't even look over. "For a while I was really not okay. And you were my childhood friend. You were supposed to be the one person I didn't have to sound okay for."
The bookshelf behind the bar, the one that hid the back room where Silas took his private meetings, seemed to loom a little larger in the dim light. Rory had never been back there. She stared at its spines instead of at Eva's face, because Eva's face was too composed now, too adult in a way that made Rory feel like she was still nineteen and standing on the platform at Cardiff Central with a suitcase.
Eva swallowed. Her eyes were shiny. "I know. I know that now. I was twenty-two and I thought if I ignored it, you'd just... settle. Like you'd always do. You were always the clever one, Ror. Pre-Law at Cardiff, even though you hated it. Your mum and dad — Jennifer and Brendan — they always said you'd land on your feet. I told myself you'd land."
"My dad's a barrister, not a magician," Rory said, and then, despite herself, she huffed a small, hurt laugh. "He did think Pre-Law would fix me. You know how that went."
"I remember you crying in the library because you didn't want to go," Eva said softly . The old accent slipped back for a second, just on that word, library. "I should have come to get you from the station. I regret that. I have regretted that for three years."
Rory looked at her then. Really looked. Eva's sharp haircut couldn't hide that she was tired, too. There were lines under her eyes, and her silk shirt was a little frayed at the collar if you looked close. She had changed, yes, but not into someone untouchable. She had changed into someone who was trying very hard.
"Why are you here?" Rory asked. It came out gentler this time. "Tonight. In this bar."
Eva glanced around, at the maps, at the photographs, at Silas polishing another glass with his signet ring flashing. "I walked past. Saw the green sign. I remembered you said you lived above a bar with a green sign. The Raven's Nest. I thought— maybe it was stupid. I was in Soho for a client dinner. I thought I'd see if you were still here."
"I live upstairs," Rory said. "I still do deliveries for Yu-Fei. I'm still here."
They stood there for a moment, the music low, the rain ticking against the windows. The weight of time was not in big things, Rory thought. It was in this: that they knew exactly how the other took her tea and still didn't know what to say next.
Eva reached out, hesitated, then touched Rory's forearm, just above the crescent scar. Her hand was cold from the wine glass.
"Do you want to get dinner?" Eva asked. "Properly. Not just... this. I can do Thursday. Or whenever you're not running soup to Camden."
Rory felt the old, quick thinking kick in, the out-of-the-box part that wanted to calculate the risk, the odds that they'd disappoint each other again. She pushed it aside.
"Thursday," she said. "I'm free Thursday. But not somewhere fancy. Somewhere where you can take that blouse off and not worry about it."
Eva laughed for real this time, a little wet. "God, I miss you."
"I know," Rory said, and she found she meant it.
Silas, without asking, poured a second whisky and slid it toward Eva. He gave Rory a small, almost imperceptible nod, the kind of acknowledgment that had made him a good spymaster and now made him a good barman. He didn't intrude. Rory lifted her glass.
Eva lifted hers to meet it, and they drank.