Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAHHBJ97TS26TSNKK4059Y

The green neon above the door of the Raven's Nest stuttered the way it always had, the second letter flickering so the sign read RAVEN'S NES. Rory ducked beneath it with Dean Street's rain still dripping off her hood and the Golden Empress delivery bag hanging heavy from one shoulder. Ten hours of soaked cardboard had softened the plastic handles to rag. Silas glanced up from the taps and lifted two fingers from the bar, the nod he reserved for people who paid rent above his cellar. Then his gaze slid past her to the far end of the counter, and it stayed there a moment too long. Rory followed it. A woman sat hunched over a short glass of something clear, a cream wool coat folded across the stool beside her. Her hair had been cropped into a sharp bob the colour of wet sand. Rory knew the set of those shoulders before she knew the face. Eva had never once in her life sat with her back to a room. "Don't," Rory said. Silas set a whisky in front of a man in a pinstriped suit. "I haven't said a word." "You were about to." "I was about to offer you a towel." He nodded at the bag. "Get that off the floor before someone trips on it." She crossed the room the long way, past the wall of yellowed maps and the black-and-white photographs of men nobody had bothered to name, and stopped beside the stool. The bag thumped against her hip. "Eva." Eva turned, and something in her face shut like a door and then, reluctantly, opened again. "Rory." She looked her up and down. "Christ. You look like you've been dragged out of the Taff." "I've been out in it since six. Is that gin?" "Soda water. Gin's for people with somewhere to be in the morning." Eva lifted her left hand from the glass. A thin band of gold caught the green light from the window. "I've got a nine o'clock with a man called Hallam about a block of flats in Walthamstow. Forty-two units. He wants them to look like they were built by someone who cared." "And were they?" "Built by a man who cared about his margins." Eva's mouth twitched, but it didn't reach her eyes. "You'd be good at that. Telling him no in a way that sounds like yes." Rory took the stool beside her. It was too low, and her knees came up awkwardly. She put the bag on the floor. Her thumb found the thin crescent scar on the inside of her left wrist, the way it always did when she sat down somewhere she hadn't planned to be. Eva watched the movement. "You still do that." "Do what?" "Rub that thing like it's a rosary." Eva turned her glass a quarter-turn on its mat. "Ring's new, by the way. Eight months. He's an accountant. He's kind, and he's dull as dishwater, and I love him so much it makes me want to lie down on the pavement." "Congratulations." "Gwen's three. Tom's seven months. You'd know that if you'd picked up." The words landed flat on the bar between them. Rory looked at the wall of maps instead, at the thin red line of a coastal road in Brittany that had been faded for decades. "I know," she said. "You don't know. You've never seen a picture of him. I sent you four." Eva's voice stayed level, which was worse than if it had risen. "I rang you the night Mum died. Three times. You sent lilies." "I know." "I hate lilies." "I know that too." "Do you?" Eva picked up the glass and didn't drink from it. "Because I've been thinking about it all day, and I'm not sure I ever told you that. Maybe I just assumed you'd remember, like you remember everything else about me, right up until it's inconvenient." Silas appeared on the other side of the bar. He moved with the careful weight he always carried in his left leg, and the silver signet on his right hand tapped the wood once as he set down a pint of bitter in front of Rory. She hadn't ordered it. She hadn't needed to. "On the house," he said. "Eva, your cab's booked for half nine. I'll ring them back if you want more time." "I don't want more time." Eva didn't look at him. She looked at Rory. "I want to know whether you remember what you said at the station." Rory's hand stopped on the glass. The condensation cold against her palm. "I said I'd send for you," she said. "You said the minute you had a bed that wasn't a sofa." Eva's fingers curled around the stem of her glass. "You had a sofa for six years, Rory. I know, because I came up on the train twice to see it and you had the same mug on the same arm both times. Then I stopped coming, and you stopped writing, and then you were the one who sent lilies." "It wasn't like that." "Then what was it like?" The neon above the door flickered again, and for a second the letters disappeared entirely, leaving the room lit only by the bottles behind the bar and the amber glow of the whisky in the pinstriped man's glass. Rory opened her mouth, closed it, and reached for the pint instead.