Run: 2026-10-08-01M4DZ1S21V9KMBNDM6J4DARXT

The rain had followed Aurora Carter all the way from Holborn, and it dripped from the hem of her coat onto the boards of the Raven's Nest as she shouldered through the door. She stopped under the green neon glow, shook out her umbrella, and nearly walked into the woman perched on the third stool from the end. The woman turned. The face was older, sharper at the jaw, but the eyes were the same bruised grey they had always been. "Well," said Eva Marsh. "Look what the weather dragged in." Rory didn't answer right away. She folded the umbrella with more care than it needed and propped it against the bar. Silas glanced up from the till, took one look at her face, and reached for a glass without being asked. "You know each other?" he said. "Since we were six," Eva said. "She owes me forty quid and a wedding present." "I sent the present." "You sent a card with a fern on it." Rory slid onto the stool beside her. Up close, Eva's hair was cropped short and shot through with grey, and her hands rested flat on the wood as though she were holding the bar down. No ring. A thin silver chain at her throat. Rory noticed the lack of a glass in front of her before she noticed anything else, and she hated that she noticed. "Sparkling water," Eva said, following her gaze. "Eleven months, if you're counting. Which you're not, because you don't write." Silas set a whisky down in front of Rory and moved off toward the far end of the bar. He didn't go far. He never did. "I wrote," Rory said. "Twice. Both times from a number I couldn't ring back." "I was moving around." "You were hiding." Eva said it without heat, which was worse. "There's a difference, Rory. I know you know there is. You made me promise I'd never ask where Evan was. I didn't ask. I just sat in Cardiff for four years waiting to hear you'd gone back to him." The whisky burned going down. Rory let it. "I didn't go back." "I know. I checked." A brief, tight smile. "Wasn't easy. Your mam's still in the same house on Cathedral Road, you know. She asked after you at the Christmas fete. She looked smaller than she used to." "You went to the fete?" "I go to most things now. Turns out when you stop drinking, you've got a lot of Saturdays to fill." The bar was filling behind them. Someone laughed too loudly near the fireplace, and a record crackled to life under the noise. Rory studied the photographs on the wall above the optics, black-and-white faces she didn't know, a harbour in some century that wasn't theirs. Anything but the woman beside her. "You look well," she said. "I look like someone who's been sober for eleven months and is sitting in a bar anyway." Eva turned her water glass a quarter turn. "That's not a criticism. I came here because I wanted to see if I could. Sit next to a drink and not want it. Turns out I can. Didn't expect to be sitting next to you while I did it." "Is that why you're here? Testing yourself?" "I'm here because my sponsor says I need to stop going to the same three places. Your Silas does a decent sparkling water, apparently." Eva glanced down the bar at him. He lifted one hand from the tap, a small nod. "He doesn't ask questions either. I like that about him." "He asks questions," Rory said. "He just waits until you answer them yourself." "Like you used to." "I didn't wait for anything. I ran." "You did." Eva finally looked at her properly, and the grey eyes held her in a way they hadn't since they were teenagers on the wall behind the Llandaff playing fields, sharing a bag of chips and a plan to conquer the world. "I told you to run. I gave you the money. I put you on the train with a rucksack and a bloody sandwich. And I've never once been sure whether I did you a favour." Rory set the glass down. Her wrist, the one with the small crescent scar from the fence behind the primary school, pressed against the edge of the bar. She had not realised she was holding it that way until now. "You did me a favour," she said. "Say it like you mean it." "I mean it." "Then why does it sound like you're apologising for something?" Rory opened her mouth. Closed it. The record changed to something slow and brassy, and somewhere a woman was telling another woman to keep her voice down. "Because I should have rung you," Rory said at last. "The first birthday. The second. When Dad died. I should have rung, and I didn't, because every time I picked up the phone I thought, Eva will hear it in my voice. She'll hear I'm still scared. And she'll be right." Eva was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached across the gap between their stools and laid her hand over Rory's, over the scarred wrist, lightly. "I'd have heard it," she said. "Yeah. But I'd have answered anyway." Rory looked at their hands. Eva's knuckles were red and chapped, a working woman's hands now, and the nails were short and clean. Rory had no idea what she did for a living. Nothing had prepared her for that gap, the eleven years of lives lived in different postcodes, and it struck her now with a force that made her throat tighten. "What do you do now?" she asked. "Properly." "Night shifts at St Thomas'. Palliative ward." Eva's thumb moved once across her knuckles. "I sit with people who are dying and I hold their hands and tell them the truth when they ask for it. Turns out I'm quite good at that. Who'd have guessed?" "I'd have guessed." "You'd have guessed I'd be a barrister, and I'd have told you to bugger off." Eva's mouth twitched. "Ask me again in a year. Maybe I'll have changed my mind." Silas came back down the bar, not hurrying, and set a small dish of salted almonds between them without comment. He looked at Eva, then at Rory, and something passed across his face that might have been recognition or might have been sympathy. He moved off again before either of them could thank him. "He's watching us," Eva said. "He always watches." "Good. Someone should." Rory turned her glass in a slow circle on the wood. The whisky had gone flat and warm, and she didn't want it anymore. She wanted to ask what Eva's sponsor looked like, whether the sparkling water tasted of anything, whether the grey hair was a choice or simply what eleven years had done. She wanted to ask whether the chain at Eva's throat was new, and what it meant, and whether she could be trusted to hear the answer. Instead she said, "Do you still have that stupid bike?" Eva laughed, a short startled sound that turned heads at the far end of the bar. "Rory Carter," she said, shaking her head. "You owe me a bike."