Run: 2026-10-08-01M4D9ZEFCWJ2FSRBP59FVP5KR

The sign outside the Raven's Nest had buzzed green for as long as Rory had lived above it, and she had long ago stopped seeing it. Tonight she noticed it, the way the neon stained the wet pavement and made the people hurrying past look faintly ill. She pushed through the door with a delivery bag still hooked over one shoulder, out of habit, and the familiar warmth hit her: beer, woodsmoke from the old gas fire, the dry paper smell of the maps that covered every wall. Silas lifted his chin at her from behind the bar. He didn't ask about the bag. He never did. He slid a glass of sparkling water across the wood and went back to polishing a tumbler with the slow care of a man who had nowhere else to be. She took the stool at the end, where she could see the door and the bookshelf that hid the back room, and she was halfway through the first sip when she felt it, the particular weight of being looked at. "Laila?" Rory did not turn right away. She set the glass down and let her eyes move to the mirror behind the optics, where a woman in a pale wool coat stood just inside the entrance with rain in her fair hair. It took a second for the face to come together. Then it did, all at once, and something in Rory's chest gave a painful lurch. "Eva," she said. Eva crossed the room in a few quick steps and stopped, uncertain, as if she might be refused. She looked older. Not in any unkind way. Her face had settled into itself, and there were faint lines at the corners of her eyes that had earned their place. Her hands were bare of rings, which Rory noticed and then wished she hadn't. "I thought it was you," Eva said. "I saw you through the window and I thought, no, that's not possible, she'd never come back to this part of town." She laughed, a little breathless. "I nearly walked past." "You'd have been right to." "Don't." Eva pulled out the stool beside her and sat without waiting to be asked. "Don't do that. You always did that." Silas had moved down the bar without seeming to, and he set a second glass in front of Eva without a word. He gave Rory one long look, unreadable, then drifted off to the far end where a pair of men were arguing quietly over a crossword. "Cardiff's still there," Eva said. "In case you were wondering. Your mum still does the Thursday choir. Your dad still thinks you're in a chambers somewhere, reading case law until your eyes bleed." Rory's fingers found the thin crescent scar on her left wrist, the way they always did when a conversation wandered toward home. "He's not wrong about the eyes." "You're not in chambers." "No." "You're delivering takeaway." "Among other things." Eva studied her, and Rory had the sudden, uncomfortable sense of being measured the way she herself measured a room, the exits, the hands, the people who sat with their backs to the wall. She hated that she recognised the habit. She hated more that she had learned it somewhere between the flat in Canton and the first night she'd slept with a chair wedged under the door handle. "I tried to call," Eva said quietly. "After you went quiet. Maybe six times. Then I stopped." "I know." "You know?" "I got them. I listened to the first one." Rory turned the glass slowly on its mat. "I couldn't pick up. If I'd heard your voice I'd have told you everything, and I wasn't ready for you to know what I was running from. You'd have made me go back to the police. You'd have been right to." "I'd have helped you." "I know that too." Her throat was tight. "That was the problem." For a while neither of them spoke. Somewhere behind them the gas fire ticked. On the wall above the optics, a black-and-white photograph of a rain-soaked harbour in some forgotten port had gone the colour of weak tea. "You used to be the loudest person in any room," Eva said at last. There was no accusation in it, only a kind of bafflement. "You'd argue with the bus driver about the route. You'd tell teachers they were wrong about the Tudors, and you'd be right, and you'd make them admit it in front of everyone." "I'm still right about the Tudors." "I know. That's what I mean." Eva's voice softened. "You're so quiet now. It's like you're listening for something." Rory let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Occupational hazard." "Is it? Or is that just the thing you became when you stopped being the girl I knew?" The question landed somewhere tender, and Rory didn't answer it. Instead she said, "Are you happy, Eva?" Eva considered this seriously, the way she had always considered things, turning the question over before she trusted it with an answer. "Mostly," she said. "Yes. I'm a solicitor now. Little office on Bute Street. I got married two years ago to a man who's kind and boring and remembers my birthday. We're trying for a baby." She smiled, then faltered. "Sorry. That's probably not what you want to hear." "It's exactly what I want to hear." And she meant it, which surprised her. "I'm glad. Truly. You deserved the ordinary version." "And you?" Rory looked at the bookshelf, at the unmarked spine of a book that concealed a door, at the old maps curling at their edges, at the life she had built out of scraps and silence. She thought of the flat above the bar, the bag of Golden Empress cartons by the door, the way she still checked the street before she turned her key. "I'm alive," she said. "That's most of it, I think." Eva reached across the gap between the stools and laid her hand over Rory's, carefully, not gripping, the way you'd touch something you weren't sure would hold. Rory let her. The scar pressed warm against her palm. "You can call me," Eva said. "Whenever. Even if you don't pick up straight away. I'll keep trying." Rory nodded, unable to trust her voice, and in the mirror behind the bottles she saw two women sitting close at the end of a bar, one dark-haired and watchful, one fair and hopeful, and she could not tell anymore which of them had lost more time.