AI The rain had turned the green neon above The Raven's Nest into a smear on the wet pavement. Rory watched it from the narrow window of the stairwell that led down from her flat, the light catching in puddles and washing the Soho street in a sickly, beautiful glow. She had a canvas tote hooked over one shoulder and her delivery jacket half-zipped, though she wasn't on shift. Tuesdays Yu-Fei gave her off, and she usually spent them upstairs with the kettle and a law textbook she opened more out of habit than intent. Tonight the bar below had been too quiet to ignore.
She pushed through the side door, the one that let directly into the Nest from the stairwell, and the familiar smell hit her — old wood polish, spilled lager, the faint lemon cleaner Silas insisted on even though it never quite won.
It was early. The maps on the walls looked darker in the low light, the black-and-white photographs of Prague and Berlin and places she didn't know the names of dulled to grey. Only three people sat at the tables. Silas was behind the bar, his back to her as he lifted a crate of glasses. He moved with that practiced economy she had come to recognize, favoring his left leg just enough that you noticed it if you were watching for it.
"You don't have to limp louder when I'm around," she said.
He set the crate down without looking over his shoulder. "And you don't have to use the staff entrance when you're not staff."
His hair caught the light from the bar, auburn shot through with grey, the same streak in his neatly trimmed beard. When he turned, his hazel eyes found her and softened. The silver signet ring on his right hand clicked against the glass he was drying .
"Yu-Fei not working you hard enough?" he asked.
"Day off. Thought I'd see if you needed a hand."
"You thought you'd see if I had any crisps you hadn't paid for," he said, but he slid a bowl across the bar toward her anyway. Rory took the stool at the corner, the one where she could see both the front door and the bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf. Her left wrist rested on the bar, sleeve pushed up from the rain, and the small crescent-shaped scar there caught the light, pale against her skin. A childhood accident, a broken mug on a kitchen floor in Cardiff. She rubbed at it without thinking.
The front door opened and the bell jingled, letting in a gust of wet air and street noise.
Rory didn't look up at first. Soho doors opened all night. Then Silas said, "Well," in a tone she hadn't heard before, not quite surprise, and she glanced over .
The woman in the doorway was shaking rain from a dark umbrella, trying not to drip on the mat. She wore a camel coat that probably cost more than Rory's monthly rent, her blonde hair cut into a sharp bob that brushed her jaw. She looked efficiently put together, the kind of woman who had a calendar that synced across devices.
Rory knew her from the way she held her umbrella, like a weapon.
"Eva?" she said.
Eva looked up. For a second her face did nothing, as if the name had missed. Then her eyes widened, bright blue meeting bright blue across the dim bar.
"Rory? Oh my God."
Rory was already standing . The stool scraped loud against the floor. She hadn't seen Eva in three years, not since the week after she'd arrived in London with one suitcase and a bruise on her cheekbone that makeup couldn't hide. That Eva had been loud, half-shaved head, chipped black nail polish, a laugh that took up a whole room in their flat in Cathays. This Eva stared at her with her mouth slightly open, her composure cracking at the edges.
"You live here?" Eva said, stepping forward. She smelled like expensive perfume and rain. "I was just — Silas texted me you might be — I didn't think —"
Silas had come around the bar, his slight limp more pronounced on the uneven boards. He rested a hand briefly on Eva's shoulder, a quiet, steady pressure.
"She's upstairs," he said. "Just as you left her, more or less."
Eva laughed, a short, startled sound. "You haven't changed at all."
Rory felt the words land oddly. Her straight black hair was cut to her shoulders now, severe and practical, tucked behind her ears. She wore no makeup. Her delivery jacket had a tear at the pocket she had mended with black thread. She looked nothing like the girl who had sat in Cardiff University lecture halls in a blazer her father had bought her, taking notes she didn't want to take.
"You have," Rory said.
Eva flushed. She unbuttoned her coat, revealing a charcoal suit underneath. "Work," she said, as if apologizing for it. "I'm at Claredon now. Consulting. You know."
Rory didn't know. The last she'd heard, Eva was pulling espresso shots and trying to get a gallery to show her photographs.
"You cut your hair," Eva said.
"You grew yours out," Rory said.
There was a beat where they both smiled and it didn't reach anywhere.
"Do you want a drink?" Silas asked Eva, his quiet authority filling the space they had left empty. "On the house. For the reunion."
"Wine," Eva said quickly . "White. Please."
"Bottle of red open," Rory said. "I'll have what she's having."
Silas nodded and went to get it, his signet ring catching again as he reached for the glasses. Rory and Eva stood there, two feet apart, not quite knowing where to put their hands .
Eva looked around the bar, at the maps, at the photographs. "God, this place. I used to make you come here and you hated it. You said it smelled like old men."
"It still does," Rory said.
Eva laughed properly this time, and some of the old Eva cracked through — that snort she got when she was really amused. "Do you remember when you tried to get us into that club in Cardiff with Brendan's ID? You were so cool-headed about it until the bouncer actually looked at it and you completely blanked."
"You told him it was your dad's and you were doing a sociology experiment," Rory said. The memory came sharp and whole, the two of them on Queen Street at nineteen, invincible and stupid. Rory could still feel the clammy plastic of the fake ID in her palm.
"We got in," Eva said.
"We got kicked out ten minutes later because you tried to steal the tip jar for 'art.'"
They laughed together and it was easier, for a moment. Silas set two glasses of wine down. Eva took hers with both hands.
"I saw your mum last month," Eva said, after a sip. "In Cardiff. At the market. She asked after you."
Rory's fingers tightened around her glass. Her mother Jennifer, still teaching, still asking.
"What did you tell her?" Rory asked, her voice level.
"That you were good. That you were working. That you looked well." Eva looked down. "It was a lie, mostly. I hadn't actually seen you in — I mean, I didn't know if you were well. I should have..."
The sentence trailed. The bar's low music — something with a brushed drum — filled the gap.
Rory watched Eva's face. The polished woman in the suit was gone for a second and there was just the girl who had sat with her on the floor of her bedroom after Evan had thrown her phone at the wall, who had said, "Come to London. Right now. My aunt has a place, you can stay, just come," and then had bought the train ticket herself when Rory said she couldn't afford it.
"You did enough," Rory said quietly. She meant it to be kind, but it came out flat.
Eva shook her head. "I called, for a while. You didn't pick up."
"I know."
"I figured you needed space. Then work got — and I just... I told myself you were okay because you were here. With Silas. That you had someone who actually knew what he was doing. Not just me pretending I knew how to help."
Silas, wiping a glass down the bar, did not look over, but Rory saw his shoulders shift, listening without intruding. That was his way.
Rory thought about the first month in London, how she had jumped at every knock on the flat door, how she had taken the Golden Empress delivery shifts because moving on a bicycle through traffic was the only time her head went quiet. How Eva had brought her soup and then stopped coming by when Rory stopped answering the door, not out of cruelty but out of a helplessness Rory recognized now because she felt it too, looking at Eva's expensive coat and tired eyes.
"You did know how to help," Rory said. "You got me out. I never — I didn't say thank you properly. I just left Cardiff and then I left you, too."
"No," Eva said quickly , too quickly . "Don't. You don't have to do that. I was angry for a bit, yeah. That you wouldn't talk to me. But I get it now. I think. You had to make a different person, right? And I wasn't part of that person."
The words were too accurate. Rory felt her throat get tight. She had spent two years building a cool-headed, practical version of herself that could carry three takeaway bags up three flights without spilling the soup, that could read a delivery address and find the fastest route without thinking, that could sleep above a bar and not flinch when glasses broke downstairs. That Rory hadn't had room for late-night phone calls about the past.
She reached out without deciding to, her left hand closing over Eva's where it rested on the bar. The crescent scar was stark against Eva's manicured fingers.
"You were part of it," Rory said. "You are."
Eva's eyes filled, sudden and bright. She blinked hard, recovering the consulting polish. "I'm in London more now. The Claredon office is here. We could... I could not be terrible at texting back?"
Rory huffed a laugh. "Low bar."
"Very low. Limbo low."
Silas set a small dish of olives between them, unasked. "On the house as well," he said. "You'll need something to absorb the wine. Both of you look like you haven't eaten properly since 2019."
Eva wiped at her eyes and laughed, and Rory felt the tension in her own shoulders ease a fraction. The green neon buzzed faintly through the front window, rain ticking against it. Somewhere behind the bookshelf, the hidden back room sat empty, waiting for whatever clandestine meeting Silas would host next week, but here in the front, it was just a bar on a wet Tuesday, with old maps and bad lighting and two friends trying to learn the shape of each other again.
"Are you still taking photos?" Rory asked.
Eva made a face. "On weekends. Badly. Are you still going to be a barrister and make your dad proud?"
"Absolutely not," Rory said, and Eva grinned because that, at least, was an answer that hadn't changed at all.
They drank their wine and talked, carefully at first and then faster, over each other, about Cardiff and London and nothing important, while Silas kept his quiet watch from behind the bar, his limp forgotten as he leaned against it, the ring glinting on his right hand every time he lifted a glass.