Run: 2026-09-29-01M3P2DSZ6RJ0XRVRE6H0GDNGF

The green neon buzzed over the door of the Raven's Nest, and Rory ducked beneath it with the Golden Empress bag still knotted around her wrist. Rain ran off her jacket. Her shift had ended forty minutes ago, but the last drop-off had been a fourth-floor walk-up in Berwick Street with a broken buzzer, and the lift was a rumour. "You smell like a wok," Silas said from behind the bar. He didn't look up from the glass he was polishing. His signet ring clicked against the rim. "You say that like it's a bad thing." "I say it like a man who's out of prawn crackers." She dug into the bag and tossed him a paper sleeve of them. He caught it without breaking his rhythm. Then his eyes went past her shoulder, and the rag stopped moving. The door opened behind her. Cold air came in, and with it the sound of heels. Rory turned. The woman in the doorway wore a camel coat belted at the waist, and her dark hair was pinned into a knot so tidy it looked engineered. She carried an umbrella folded to a sword's width. No rings on her fingers except one, thin and gold. She scanned the room the way people scan a menu in a language they half speak, and her gaze landed on Rory and stayed there. "Rory?" Nobody had called her that in that voice for six years. "Eva." The name came out flat and small. "Bloody hell." "Yeah." Eva laughed, one short breath through her nose. The old Eva would have shrieked it across the room and knocked over a stool getting to her. "I was meeting someone. Down the road. They cancelled, and I thought, one drink, somewhere that isn't a hotel." She lifted a hand toward the maps on the walls, the photographs, the low amber lamps. "Then I saw the sign." "You picked the wrong bar." "Did I?" Rory wasn't sure. She pulled out the stool beside her, and Eva sat, hanging the umbrella from the bar's edge. Silas drifted down the counter and set a coaster in front of her. "What can I get you?" "Sparkling water. Lime, if you have it." Rory's head turned before she could stop it. Silas's brows barely moved, but he turned to the fridge without a word. "Water," Rory said. "I know how it sounds." "It sounds like someone else's order." Eva's mouth twitched. "Eighteen months, in March." "Since what?" "Since I stopped." She turned the coaster a quarter turn on the wood, then another. "You're the first person I've said that to who didn't already know." The glass arrived, bubbles crawling up the sides. Eva didn't touch it. Her nails were short and clean and unpainted. At sixteen she had chewed them to red crescents, and she'd once bled onto Rory's maths homework and laughed about it. "You cut your hair," Rory said. "You didn't." Eva glanced at the black line of it against Rory's jaw. "God, you look exactly the same. It's obscene." "I don't." "You do. You've got that look, like you're doing sums behind your eyes." "I'm calculating how much you owe me for that sofa." The words landed on the bar between them. Eva's smile held for a second and then folded. "Rory." "I'm joking." "You're not." Rory peeled the bag from her wrist and set it on the floor. The plastic had left a pink groove across the skin, right over the little crescent scar. Eva's eyes went to it and stayed. "Garden wall," Eva said. "Nan's house. I told you it would hold us both." "You told me a lot of things would hold." "I know." Silas moved to the far end of the bar and began to rearrange bottles that did not need rearranging. Rain ticked at the front window. Behind the bookshelf in the back, a floorboard settled, though nobody was in there. "Two weeks," Rory said. "I got off the coach at Victoria with two bags and your text still open on my phone. *Come, I've got a sofa, I've got wine, I've got a whole plan.* Two weeks after that, I rang you and got an automated woman telling me the number was out of service." "Singapore came through faster than I expected." "You could have said." "I meant to." "For six years?" Eva lifted the glass at last and drank half of it, her throat working. When she set it down, the lime wedge rocked against the ice. "I was scared," she said. "That's the ugly answer. You'd left him because I kept ringing you and telling you to leave, and then you did it, and you were standing in London with nothing, and it was my fault, and I couldn't be the person who had to look at that." "It wasn't your fault." "Wasn't it? I pushed." "You pushed me out of a burning house, Eva." "And then I went to Singapore and drank my way through a six-figure contract." Her laugh cracked at the edge. "The girl who told you to be brave. She lasted about a fortnight." Rory looked at the woman beside her, at the stillness, the folded hands, the careful posture of someone who had learned to sit through her own restlessness. The Eva she had known spun on bar stools and stole chips off strangers' plates and cried at adverts for building societies. This one measured her breath before she used it. "Where did she go?" Rory asked. "Who?" "The one who set fire to the school bins." "That was you." "It was your lighter." "It was my lighter." Eva pressed the heel of her hand under one eye and left it there a moment. "She's still around. She just doesn't get the keys anymore." "I liked her." "I know you did. She liked you more than she deserved." Silas returned with a saucer of olives nobody had ordered and slid it between them. He set it down with his good hand, his weight shifted onto the right leg, and went away again without a glance. Eva picked one up and rolled it between two fingers. "Tell me you're well. Tell me something that makes the last six years less of a crime." "I deliver noodles for a woman named Yu-Fei who calls me *Little Storm*. I live upstairs." Rory pointed at the ceiling. "There's a man down there with a limp who taught me to tell when someone's lying by watching their feet." "And?" "And you're lying now." Eva froze with the olive halfway to her mouth. "Am I?" "Your left foot's hooked round the stool. You do it when you're about to run." Eva looked down. Her heel slid free of the rung, and she set both shoes flat on the floor. "There she is," Rory said. "Christ." Eva put the olive back on the saucer. "I was going to say I'm sorry in the first minute, and then I sat here and drank a whole glass of water instead." "You've said it now." "I said it badly." "You said it in a coat that costs more than my rent." A real laugh broke out of Eva then, loud, ragged, and old. Two men at the far table turned to look. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and her shoulders shook above it. When her hand came away, her eyes were wet and her hair had loosened at one temple. "Same," Eva said. "You're exactly the same." "I'm not. I just don't tell people." Rory reached for the saucer, took an olive, and pushed the rest across the wood. Eva took one. They ate in silence, with the neon humming green through the front glass and lighting the rain outside in long slanted threads. "Stay for another," Rory said. "It's water." "I'll watch you drink it." Eva looked at the door, then at the umbrella hanging beside her knee. She lifted a finger toward the far end of the bar. "Another sparkling," she called. "And whatever she's having." Silas reached for the whisky.