Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA0B2KY426JVEQ1EME5DYW

The green neon of the Raven's Nest bled across the wet pavement of Greek Street, and Aurora Carter stopped beneath it with a delivery bag still slung across her chest, the Golden Empress's paper seal soft with rain. She had meant to go straight up the stairs to her flat. Instead she pushed through the door because the cold had got into her wrist, the old crescent scar aching the way it did in weather, and because the bar was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and bitter oranges. Silas glanced up from behind the bar. He lifted two fingers from the wood in a greeting that asked nothing, then went back to cutting lemons. His silver signet ring caught the lamplight. She had watched him for two years, and she still could not tell whether his stillness was patience or a habit he had learned in some other country. She turned to hang her jacket on the hook by the door and stopped. A woman sat in the corner booth beneath the wall of old maps, a glass of red wine untouched in front of her. Her hair was shorter, cut to the jaw and streaked with a copper that had not existed when they were nineteen. She wore a camel coat buttoned wrong, as if she had dressed in a hurry and not looked back. But she had the same way of tilting her head when she was deciding whether to be amused, and when she looked up and saw Rory, the tilt came first. "Well," said Eva Price. "I'd have bet the house against this." Rory's mouth went dry. She had imagined this moment in several versions over the years, most of them at three in the morning, and in none of them had she been holding a damp paper bag of sweet and sour pork. "Eva." "Don't look like that. You look like you've seen a ghost, and I'm very much alive, thank you." Eva gestured at the empty seat across from her. "Sit down before Silas decides you're causing trouble." Rory sat. The leather was cold through her trousers. For a moment neither of them spoke, and the silence had a shape to it, full of Cardiff rain and a bedroom with a broken window and a promise made at a bus stop that Rory had not kept in the way she'd meant to. "How long has it been?" Eva asked. "Four years. Five, in March." "You counted." "I count everything now." It came out flatter than she intended. She heard it and winced. Eva studied her, and Rory felt the look travel the way it always had, from the set of her shoulders to the chipped nail on her thumb to the scar on her wrist, which she had not bothered to cover. Eva's gaze stopped there and stayed a beat too long. Rory tugged her sleeve down. "You've changed," Eva said quietly. "So have you." "Mine's the obvious kind. Hair, a husband, a mortgage in Pinner that I pretend to hate." Eva turned the wine glass slowly by its stem. "Yours is the other kind. The kind where I can't work out what you're hiding, because I used to know everything you were hiding." Rory almost laughed. "I'm delivering takeaway and sleeping above a bar, Eva. There's not much to hide. It's rather dull." "You don't sleep. You never slept. You used to lie awake listing every way a thing could go wrong and then pick the one you could fix." Eva's voice softened. "I asked Brendan about you once. At your mum's birthday, before... well. He said you'd been in London two months and he couldn't get you on the phone. He said you'd written him a letter that was four lines long and every line was a lawyer's line." The name landed heavier than it should have. Rory looked at the wine, at the map on the wall behind Eva's head, a faded chart of the Adriatic with a pin hole where something had once been fixed. Her father had kept maps like that in his study, pinned above a desk covered in case files. He had taught her that every argument had a shape, and if you could see the shape you could walk around it. "He was angry," she said. "I didn't give him much to work with." "He wasn't angry. He was frightened for you. You know that." "I know." Across the room, Silas set down his knife. He came around the bar with the careful weight he always carried on his left leg, the old knee injury that he never mentioned and never hid, and he paused beside their table without quite stopping. "Rory. Table nine's been asking for their bill for ten minutes. I'll take the bag if you like." She looked up at him. There was a question in his hazel eyes, and under the question something else, something that looked very much like permission. He did not ask who Eva was. He never asked what anyone was. "Thank you," she said. "I'll bring it down in a minute." When he had gone, Eva leaned forward. "Is he your boss?" "He's my landlord. And he's ... he's the closest thing I've got to a family in this city, I suppose. Which is pathetic, when you say it out loud." "It isn't pathetic." Eva's hand crept across the table and stopped short of hers. "I'm glad you have someone." The words hurt in an unexpected place. Rory thought of Evan, of the nights she had spent learning which floorboards creaked and which doors locked from the outside, and of the morning she had walked out with one bag and a stolen bus fare, and Eva's voice on the phone saying, *Come to London. I'll find you somewhere. Just come.* She had not gone back for the funeral of Eva's gran or the christening of Eva's first child. She had sent cards with careful words. She had let distance do the cutting, because distance did not require her to explain. "I should have called," Rory said. "After the wedding. I got your invitation and I sat with it for a week, and then I wrote *congratulations* on a card and posted it and felt like I'd paid a debt." "You did pay it. You're not the one who has to keep a ledger." "I'm exactly the one." Eva was quiet. Outside, a bus groaned past, its light sliding across the bookshelves that lined the back wall, the hidden door Silas never talked about. The rain had thickened into something steadier. "Do you still want the things you wanted?" Eva asked at last. "Law. Being someone who wins." Rory considered the question honestly, which was a habit she had been trying to unlearn. "I don't know what I want. I know what I'm good at. That's different." "That's not an answer." "No," Rory agreed. "It's a confession." Eva smiled then, the old crooked smile, and for one unguarded second she looked nineteen again, wearing somebody's borrowed scarf on a bench in Bute Park. "Then let's have a drink like we used to. Something stupid. And you can tell me everything you're not telling me, and I'll pretend I don't notice you're lying." Rory reached for the wine list, and found that her hand, for once, was perfectly steady.