Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA073V7BE3K74TMQFBQM9X

The green neon above the Raven's Nest stuttered the way it always did, a half-second hitch before the letters caught. Rory had stopped noticing it months ago. Tonight she noticed it because someone was standing beneath it, squinting up at the sign as if it owed her money. She knew the set of those shoulders before she knew the face. Eva had always stood like that, weight forward, ready to argue with a bus. "You're letting the heat out," Rory said. Eva turned. Her hair was gone, or nearly. A dark crop sat close to her skull, sharp at the nape, and she wore a camel coat cut so precisely it could have been a weapon. The girl who had once shoplifted a lipstick from Howells and worn it to school like a dare was still in there somewhere. Rory just had to dig. "Rory Carter," Eva said. "Living above a bar. I should have guessed." "Silas lets me pay in cash and complaints." "Does he still wear that ring?" "Every day. Come in before you freeze to the step." Inside, the Nest smelled of woodsmoke and old paper. Silas had the lamps low. The maps on the walls had yellowed to the colour of weak tea, and the photographs of men in overcoats looked down on the bar with the same patient suspicion they had worn for twenty years. Silas glanced up from the taps, took in the coat and the haircut, and gave Rory a single nod that asked whether she needed rescuing. She shook her head a fraction. He went back to polishing a glass that was already clean. Eva took the stool nearest the door, the one with its back to the wall. Rory noticed that. She didn't say anything about it. "What'll it be?" Rory asked. "Gin. Neat. And a glass of water, which I'll drink first, because I've been told I look like I need it." "Who told you that?" "My husband." Rory set the water down. Eva's left hand rested on the bar, and a thin band caught the light. It was the first thing Rory had seen that she couldn't read. "Congratulations," she said. "I didn't know." "You wouldn't. You didn't come to the wedding." Eva lifted the water and drank it in three long swallows, the way people do when they are buying time. "Neither did I expect you to. Don't look like that. It was a small thing. Forty people in a register office in Islington and a buffet nobody touched." "Eva." "I'm not doing this to hurt you." She set the glass down and turned it a quarter turn on the wood. "I'm telling you because you're the one who'd want to know, and because you never ask anyone anything directly. You wait for them to hand it over." Rory thought of the phone on her bedside table in the flat upstairs, the screen she had scrolled through a hundred times in the last two years. Eva's name, unanswered. The message from Cardiff in March: *Mam's gone, funeral's Thursday, if you want to come.* She had typed a reply four times and deleted it four times. The fifth time she had gone to work instead. "Your mam," Rory said. "Yes." Eva's jaw moved. "She asked for you, at the end. Not in a sad way. She said you were the only one who ever made me laugh when I didn't want to be laughed at." "I'm sorry." "You said that in the card. I still have it." The silence stretched between them, filled by the soft clink of Silas stacking glasses and the murmur of a couple in the corner arguing over a crossword. Rory wanted to say something clever. Nothing clever came. "Do you still write?" Eva asked. "Not since Evan." Eva's eyes flicked to Rory's left wrist, to the thin crescent scar that had been there since they were nine and climbing the wall behind Eva's gran's allotment. Rory's sleeve had slid down. She didn't pull it back. "I should have come up to London sooner," Eva said. "When he started. I knew what was happening before you did. I just didn't have the words for it, and by the time I did, you'd already gone quiet." "You told me to come here. That was enough." "It wasn't. It got you out. It didn't get you back." Rory picked up a bar towel and folded it into a square, then folded it again. "Do you want to know why I didn't come to Cardiff?" "No," Eva said. "I want to know why you're still here, when you were the one who said you'd be on a train to Paris by twenty-six." Rory laughed, short and surprised. "Because the rent's cheap, and Silas doesn't ask questions, and I'm good at carrying food up stairs. I'm good at a lot of small, unimportant things now." "That's not an answer." "It's the one I've got." Eva studied her for a long moment, the way she used to study a maths problem she had already decided to solve her own way. Then she reached across the bar and rested her hand next to Rory's, not touching, close enough that the cold of her knuckles carried across the wood. "Tell me one thing that's still yours," she said. "Just one. Then I'll finish this gin and go home to a man who worries when I'm late." Rory looked at the hand, the ring, the bitten nail on the smallest finger that had never quite stopped being a child's. "The sign," she said at last. "I still like the sign." Eva smiled, and for a second the girl with the stolen lipstick came straight up through the woman's face and was gone again. "I know," she said. "I saw you looking at it."