AI The green neon sign buzzed against the wet Soho night, bleeding color onto the pavement below. Rory stood under it for a second too long, keys in hand, delivery bag slung over her shoulder and empty now except for the faint smell of chili oil and fried rice. Yu-Fei would be closing up the Golden Empress by now, counting the till with her reading glasses low on her nose. Rory's shift was done. She pushed open the door to The Raven's Nest and the warm, yeasty air hit her face.
It was a Tuesday, which meant it was quiet. The Nest never got truly loud until Thursday, but even quiet it had its own kind of density — low light, the amber from the bar, the walls crowded with old maps, their sea monsters curling at the edges, and black-and-white photographs that Silas never explained but never took down either. Someone had put on an old record, something with brushed drums and a piano.
Silas was behind the bar, wiping down a glass with a white towel. He didn't look up right away. His hair, grey-streaked auburn, caught the bar light, and his beard was as neatly trimmed as always. The silver signet ring on his right hand clicked faintly against the glass when he set it down.
"You've got rain on you, Rory," he said.
"Hardly," she said, shrugging off her jacket. Her straight black hair, cut straight to her shoulders, was damp at the ends. She draped the jacket over the back of a stool and took her usual seat at the far end of the bar, where she could see the door and the long row of maps. She lived upstairs, but she still liked sitting here like a customer. It made the boundary feel real.
Silas favored his left leg as he came down the bar toward her, the slight limp he never complained about but never hid either. His hazel eyes took her in, quick and assessing, the way he always did, not unkindly.
"Long route?" he asked.
"Clapham and back. Guy tipped me in scratch-offs." She showed him her left wrist where her sleeve had ridden up, the small crescent-shaped scar there catching the light for a second before she tugged the cuff down. "Lost on all three."
He made a low noise in his throat, half laugh, and poured her a half-pint without being asked . "Eva would tell you that's a fool's tax."
The name landed strange in the air, and Rory's hand tightened around the glass before she had decided to pick it up.
The door opened and the bell over it jingled, letting in a gust of damp air and street noise. Rory didn't turn at first. She heard Silas shift his weight , his attention moving.
Then a voice said, "God, is that map still crooked?"
Rory turned.
The woman standing just inside the doorway was shaking water off a navy wool coat. She was holding a leather satchel against her hip, her hair — lighter than Rory remembered, cut into a neat bob that brushed her jaw — tucked behind one ear. She wore a white button-up shirt under the coat, a thin gold chain at her throat. She looked put together in a way that made Rory suddenly aware of her own damp trainers, the faint grease spot on her jeans from the delivery bag.
For a half second Rory didn't place her, which was absurd, and then all at once she did.
"Eva?"
Eva Davies looked up. Her face did something complicated — surprise, then a wide, open smile that didn't quite reach her eyes the way it used to .
"Rory Carter," she said. "No way."
Rory was already standing . She hadn't realized she had stood. The stool scraped.
Eva crossed the short distance between them and then there was that awful, wonderful hesitation where neither of them knew whether to hug. Eva solved it by stepping in and wrapping her arms around Rory's shoulders, hard and quick. She smelled like perfume, something clean and expensive, and underneath it like rain. Rory hugged her back, feeling the sharp edge of Eva's shoulder blade under her coat, feeling how much smaller Eva felt than she remembered, or how much heavier Rory had become.
"Look at you," Eva said, holding her at arm's length. Her eyes flicked over Rory's face, her hair. "Your hair's so long. I thought you'd have — I don't know, I thought you'd look different."
"You do," Rory said before she could make it sound kinder. Eva did look different. The last time Rory had seen her properly, Eva had been nineteen , hair dyed a bright, uneven pink for a dare, wearing a Cardiff University rugby shirt that swallowed her thighs, laughing with her whole body. This Eva's makeup was precise, her nails short and manicured, a watch with a dark face on her wrist. There was a crease between her eyebrows that hadn't been there before.
"What are you doing here?" Rory asked. "In London? In — here?"
"Conference," Eva said, gesturing vaguely with the satchel. "Near Covent Garden. Legal tech. Mind-numbingly boring. I walked past and saw the sign, the green one, and I thought, that looks like the place Rory said she was crashing above. The Nest, right? I didn't think you'd still — I mean, I didn't know if you'd still be here."
Rory felt a small, familiar click in her chest, the quick recalibration she did when information didn't line up. Eva had been the one who told her to come to London in the first place. Leave Evan. Leave Cardiff. Come stay, just until you get on your feet, she'd said, over the phone at two in the morning while Rory sat on the floor of her bathroom with her wrist stinging. And Rory had. She had taken the train with a duffel bag and slept on Eva's cousin's sofa for three weeks until Silas, through a friend of a friend, offered her the flat above the bar for cheap in exchange for helping out and staying quiet about the back room behind the bookshelf.
And then Eva had moved to Bristol for a graduate scheme and stopped answering texts for weeks at a time.
"I'm still here," Rory said. She tried to make it light. "Flat upstairs. Very glamorous. You can hear the ice machine at night."
"That's very you," Eva said, and laughed, but the laugh was tight. Silas had drifted down to the other end of the bar to give them space, polishing another glass with deliberate care.
"Are you — are you staying?" Eva asked. "Can I buy you a drink? Properly? Not a half-pint, Rory, a real drink. You still drink like an old man."
"I drink like someone who doesn't want a hangover on a bike," Rory said, but she sat back down and Eva took the stool next to her, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it over the back. Her shirt was crisp. Rory could see the faint outline of an undershirt beneath it.
Silas came back, his limp barely audible on the old wood. "What can I get you?" he asked Eva, his voice even.
"White wine," Eva said. "Whatever's open."
He nodded once and poured it, his signet ring catching the amber light. He set it down in front of her without a clink and then moved away again.
Eva took a sip and made a face. "Okay, not wine country," she said.
"Silas will be devastated," Rory said.
They both laughed, and for a second it was easy, the record crackling, the bar warm around them. Then the ease thinned.
"So you're still doing the pre-law thing?" Eva asked, too casually. "Or — are you still at Cardiff?"
Rory shook her head. "No. I deferred and then I just... didn't go back. Brendan wasn't thrilled." She said her father's name the way she always had, a little flat, a little formal, the barrister's daughter. "Jennifer keeps sending me prospectuses, like they'll guilt me back. I'm doing the deliveries, some shifts here. It's fine. It's money."
Eva's fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass. "Right. Right, of course. I just remember you were so — you were going to be the one who actually did it properly. All that out-of-the-box thinking Professor Lloyd was obsessed with. He said you'd be a terror in court."
"I was good at arguing," Rory said. "Turns out you can do that without a degree."
"That was always your line," Eva said softly . "That you didn't need the degree to prove you were the smartest person in the room."
It wasn't an insult, exactly, but it landed like a pebble dropped in still water. Rory felt her cool-headedness do its old trick, the way it folded over her like a sheet of glass. She picked up her pint, took a measured sip.
"What about you?" Rory asked. "Legal tech sounds..."
"Profitable," Eva finished, and smiled without showing teeth. "It's profitable. It's a lot of emails. I wear blazers now. Can you believe it? Me, in a blazer."
Rory could, actually. The blazer was probably in the satchel. Eva had always been quick too, but in a different way — restless, bright, the kind of quick that needed to be moving, to be liked. Rory had been the one who sat quiet and found the side door.
"You look good in it," Rory said, and meant it.
Eva looked down at her wine. "I saw Evan last year," she said suddenly , very quietly, so Silas wouldn't hear. "In Cardiff. At St David's. He was with someone else. He didn't see me."
Rory's hand found the edge of the bar. The scar on her wrist gave a faint, psychosomatic ache. "Okay."
"I didn't tell him I'd seen you," Eva said quickly . "I didn't say anything. I just... I wanted you to know I didn't — I haven't talked to him. Ever. Since."
"I know," Rory said.
Eva's eyes flicked up, bright blue and suddenly very young. "Do you? Because I feel like I left you hanging. After you came up here. You were in that flat and I was in Bristol and I kept telling myself you'd call if you needed something, and you never called, and I told myself that meant you were fine."
Rory had a dozen cool-headed answers lined up. That she was fine. That she was used to not calling. That Eva had her own life and Rory had never expected otherwise. None of them made it past her teeth.
"I did need something," she said at last, her voice even and low. "I just got used to not asking."
Eva stared at her. The crease between her eyebrows deepened. "Rory —"
"I know," Rory said again, and this time she reached out and put her hand over Eva's where it rested on the bar. Her fingers were cold from the glass. Eva's were warm. "We were kids. We did what kids do. We ran."
The record ended with a soft hiss. Silas flipped it without looking at them. The maps on the wall stared down, coastlines and trade routes drawn by hands long dead.
Eva let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for years. She turned her hand over under Rory's and squeezed. "I missed you," she whispered. "I thought you'd be angry."
"I was," Rory admitted, and the honesty surprised her with how steady it sounded . "For a while. Then I was just busy. Yu-Fei's family adopted me, more or less. Silas lets me hide behind the bookshelf when I want to mope."
At that, Eva laughed for real, a sound that startled both of them. "God, you still live above a secret spy bar. That's the most Rory Carter thing I've ever heard. Of course you do."
"Retired spy," Rory corrected, and felt Silas's faint, amused hmph from down the bar without looking.
Eva drank her wine, pulling a face again, and set the glass down with more force than necessary. "Do you want to get out of here? Get actual good wine? Or chips? I want chips from that place on Old Compton Street that puts vinegar that burns your nose."
Rory glanced at the window, at the green neon buzzing steadily through the rain, at Silas behind the bar with his hazel eyes quiet and his ring glinting . She thought about the flat upstairs, the stack of unopened prospectuses on her desk, the delivery bag by her feet that still smelled faintly like someone else's dinner.
She thought about time, how it didn't really pass so much as accumulate, layer by layer, until you couldn't move without feeling the weight of it.
"Yeah," she said. "I want chips."
Eva's smile this time reached her eyes. She grabbed her coat, and Rory grabbed her jacket, and they left together into the rain, the bell jingling behind them, the maps keeping watch over the empty stools.