Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DA8ENZF6WG170SCFF0BKS5

The green neon above the door stuttered on its second letter, the way it always had, so the sign read RAVEN'S NES for a half-second before it caught itself. Rory stopped beneath it with a paper bag of takeaway containers pressed against her hip, the cardboard already softening with grease. Eleven years of Soho rain had not improved the sign. Apparently nothing in this street had changed, except the people walking through it. Inside, the bar smelled of woodsmoke and bitter orange. Silas stood behind the counter, rubbing a glass with a tea towel, his weight on his right leg. He did not look up. "Yu-Fei's delivery is for the kitchen door, Rory. Not the front." "I'm not here for the kitchen. I'm here because my feet hurt and the stairs are a crime." "The stairs have been a crime since 1987." He set the glass on the shelf and finally glanced at her. His eyes went to the bag, then to her face. "You look like you've been running." "Everyone keeps saying that." "Everyone is right." She went to slide onto a stool near the end of the bar, and that was when she saw the woman sitting alone at the far corner, a sparkling water in front of her, a lime wedge sunk to the bottom. Short hair, cropped close at the nape. A camel coat folded over the next stool like a guard dog. Rory's hand tightened on the paper bag. The woman turned, as if she had felt the stare on the back of her neck. Her face did a slow, complicated thing before it settled. "Rory Carter," Eva said. "Silas told me you were upstairs. I didn't believe him." "I said she lives upstairs," Silas said, without turning around. "I never said she came down." Rory crossed the room. The floorboards gave under her trainers the way they always had. She set the bag on the bar, and it slumped sideways, and she left it there. "You cut your hair," she said. "Eleven years, Rory. I cut a lot of things." "You're drinking water." "I've been drinking water for six years." Eva lifted the glass and turned it so the lime rolled. "You'd have known that if you'd picked up the phone once." Rory pulled out the stool beside her and sat, because her knees made the decision for her. Up close, Eva looked both older and more finished, as if someone had taken a rough sketch of her and inked the lines in with a steady hand. A thin gold band sat on her left finger. Her nails were short and clean. Rory remembered them chewed to the quick, the pink skin around them raw, the summer they had sat on the wall behind the Ellis house and Eva had counted the cars going past so she wouldn't have to talk about her dad. "You're married," Rory said. "Three years in March. He's an architect. He designs car parks, if you can believe it, and he's good at it." Eva's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "He's kind. I thought you'd want to know that before you start working out what you'd have said at the wedding." "I wasn't going to say anything." "You'd have said something clever and cutting, and then you'd have left before the cake." Rory laughed, and it surprised them both. The sound hung between them, brittle, and then Eva's shoulders loosened a fraction. Silas placed a pint in front of Rory without being asked. He did not meet either of their eyes. He moved down the bar and started wiping a section that was already clean. "I wrote to you," Eva said. "After Cardiff. After the night with Evan." "I know." "Four letters. Then I stopped." "I know that too." Rory turned the pint glass a quarter turn on its mat. Her left wrist ached where the thin crescent scar ran across the skin, the same old reminder from the broken bottle and the garden fence. She pressed her thumb against it. "I read every one. I just couldn't answer them." "Why not?" "Because you told me to come to London, and I came. You said you'd sort the flat and the job and I'd sort myself. And I did, Eva. I sorted myself into a delivery bag and a room above a bar, and every time the phone went I thought it would be you asking why I'd left you there with him." Eva's jaw tightened. She set the glass down with a precise little click. "I didn't ask you to disappear." "You didn't have to." For a long moment neither of them spoke. The neon outside flickered again, and a bus groaned past, and somewhere in the kitchen a pan hit the hob with a hard, careless sound. "Did you hate me?" Eva asked. Her voice had gone thin. Rory considered the question the way she would weigh a witness's answer in a practice exam, looking for the lie underneath. There wasn't one. "No. I hated that I needed you to be the one who made it stop." Eva closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she reached across the bar and took the lime wedge out of her water with two fingers, and she set it on the napkin between them like a small, bitter offering. "Then order another drink," she said. "And tell me what you do with your evenings now, because I want to know whether you still hate sitting still."