Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DAK0EMF2KQ2XSNZJJ541WQ

Rory had her back to the door when the bell above it rang, so she heard the voice before she saw the face. "Still drinking gin like it owes you money?" She turned on the stool. Eva Hughes stood under the green neon glow, one hand gripping the strap of a leather messenger bag, the other holding a set of car keys she had clearly meant to pocket. Her hair had been long and wild at seventeen, a cheap copper dye that bled onto every pillowcase at every sleepover in Llandaff. Now it was cropped close to her skull, and the grey at her temples looked deliberate. She wore a navy wool coat that probably cost more than Rory's share of the flat. "Eva." "Don't look like that. You look like you've seen a ghost in a dodgy wig." Eva crossed the floorboards, stopped a step short of the bar, and didn't reach for her. "Is this seat taken?" "It's yours if you want it." Eva sat. She set the keys on the wood between them, squared them against the edge, and folded her hands over the bag. Behind the bar, Silas Blackwood set a short glass of tonic in front of her without being asked. He didn't look up from the lime he was slicing. He never looked up when something mattered. He only ever looked up when the till was wrong. "Thanks, Si," Eva said. "You two know each other?" Silas asked, and Rory caught the faint limp in his step as he moved back along the shelves. "Since we were six," Rory said. "She once bit a boy called Gareth for calling me Carter the Farter." "He had it coming." "He had a lisp and a bike with no brakes. I'd say he was punished enough." Eva laughed. It was the same laugh, low and surprised at itself, and it hit Rory somewhere under the ribs. Then the laugh faded, and Eva turned the tonic glass a quarter turn on its coaster. "Nine years, Rory." "Eight and a bit." "Nine. I did the maths on the train." Eva lifted her eyes. "You could have sent a postcard. A card with a sheep on it. Anything." Rory drank her gin. It was the good stuff, Silas's stuff, and it burned in a way she had almost forgotten. "I sent you a Christmas card." "You sent a card with a robin on it and no return address. I know it was from London because the stamp said so." Eva gave a short, tight smile. "I wrote back to every postmark I could find. Then I stopped." "I know." "How would you know?" "Because you stopped writing and I stopped reading the ones I'd kept." Rory set the glass down. "That was the easiest thing I've ever done, Eva, and I'm not proud of it." Silas moved to the far end of the bar and began wiping a section of wood that was already clean. He had the sense to give them room, which was more than most people in Soho managed. Eva looked at the rows of bottles, at the old maps framed on the brick wall, at the faded black-and-white photographs of men in overcoats who had clearly never been photographed for pleasure. "Is this where you live now?" "Above it. Flat at the top of the stairs." "Working for him?" "Delivering. Yu-Fei's place on Wardour Street. Noodles and bad news, mostly." "And that's the whole of you." Eva's voice didn't rise. It thinned. "You work in a Chinese restaurant, you drink in a bar with no name on the menu, and you disappear for nine years." "It has a name. It's called the Raven's Nest." "Rory." "What?" "Don't do the thing where you make a joke so I'm the one who looks silly for asking." Rory breathed out through her nose. She had been doing that thing since she was fifteen. Her mother used to call it deflecting, in the voice she reserved for essays and missed buses. "What do you want me to say?" "I wanted you at my mum's funeral." The words sat between them, heavy as the keys. "I know." "I stood at the front of St Teilo's and looked at the back doors every single time someone opened them. Dad kept telling me to stop. He said you'd come if you could. He said you'd always been a bit of a runner." Eva's mouth twisted. "I thought he was being kind. He wasn't. He was being accurate." Rory's hands went flat on the bar. The little crescent scar on her left wrist caught the green light, pale and old. She pressed her thumb against it without meaning to, the way she always did when she wanted something to hold on to. "Evan was looking for me," she said. "Three months after I left Cardiff, he turned up at Mam's door. Mam told him I was dead. Dad told him to get off the step. I didn't know what I'd bring to the funeral. I didn't know who would be in the pews. I thought if I came back, I'd bring him with me." "And instead you brought nothing." "Instead I brought nothing." Eva picked up the tonic and drank half of it, slowly, the way someone does when they have decided to stop talking for a moment. When she set it down, her hand was steady. "I'm married now," she said. "Dan. He's a solicitor in Pontcanna. Good man. Boring about cricket. We have a daughter who's six and thinks you're a myth, because I told her you were a fairy princess who lived in a castle in London." "That's better than what I'd have said." "You'd have said I was sentimental." "You are sentimental." "I am." Eva looked at her properly then, for the first time since she'd sat down, and her eyes were wet at the rims but she didn't let anything fall. "And I'm sober six years. In case you were wondering who I'd turned into while you weren't watching." Rory didn't answer right away. She looked at the keys, at the bag, at the coat, at the short grey hair that had once been a riot of copper. She saw the woman she used to climb walls with, and she saw a stranger who had built a life brick by brick while Rory stood in a dark room and kept the door shut. "You look well," she said. "I look older." "That too." Eva laughed again, quieter this time. She slid the keys into her pocket, and the sound of them settling was small and final. "Does he let you have a second drink, your landlord-spymaster-whatever he is?" Rory raised a hand. Silas was already reaching for the gin.