Run: 2026-10-08-01M4E01EE4RHCN5G0H21HY81Z7

The green neon above the door buzzed its usual tune, a flicker that caught on the second syllable, and Rory almost turned around. She had come in for one gin and a seat with its back to the wall. Instead, the woman at the far end of the bar lifted her head from a glass of red wine, and the whole evening tipped sideways. Eva Morgan had cut her hair. The waves that used to fall past her shoulders in Cardiff were gone, replaced by a sharp bob the colour of wet sand. She wore a camel coat folded across the next stool like a guard dog, and a thin gold band sat on her left hand where nothing had sat before. "Don't do that," Eva said. "Do what?" "The face. The one where you're working out the nearest exit." Eva slid off her stool. Her heels clicked on the old boards. "Hello, Rory." Rory crossed the room slower than she meant to. Up close, Eva smelled of cold air and something expensive. "You're in London." "I've been in London for six years. You'd know that if you'd answered a single letter." Behind the bar, Silas set down a tumbler without a sound. He took in the two of them with the same unhurried attention he gave to a drunk asking for the bathroom, then reached for the Hendrick's without being asked. "Drink's on the house, Rory. Looks like you'll need it." "Thanks, Si." "Don't thank me yet," he said, and limped off toward the cellar stairs, his bad knee taking the steps one at a time. Rory sat. Eva stayed standing for a moment, then sat too, leaving a stool's width between them. "You look good," Eva said. "I look like someone who carries cases of tonic water up a flight of stairs for a living." "You still look like you could talk your way out of a locked car." "That was once." "It was twice, and you know it." Eva turned her glass by its stem. "You rang me from a service station on the M4 at four in the morning. You were crying so hard I had to ask you three times where you were." Rory picked up the gin. The ice had started to melt into it, watering it down. "I didn't think you'd come." "I didn't come. I was already in the car. I was driving to get you when you told me not to." Eva's mouth tightened. "You said, Eva, don't you dare. Then you hung up, and I didn't hear from you for eleven months." "I was sorting myself out." "Were you?" The question sat between them. Somewhere behind the bookshelf in the back, a door opened and shut, and a murmur of voices drifted through, then faded. Rory had never once asked about that room. Silas never once offered. "I got your postcards," Rory said quietly. "Every one. I kept them in a shoebox under the bed. I read them when I couldn't sleep." "That's not the same as writing back." "No." Eva laughed, but there was no warmth in it. "Christ, Rory. You always did that. You take the thing that's true and you say it so flatly that nobody can argue, and then you expect them to just stand there." "What did you want me to say? That I was scared? That I couldn't look at a phone without seeing his name on it? That every time someone in Cardiff said my surname in the market, I went cold?" "I wanted you to say something." Eva's voice cracked and she pressed her lips together until it smoothed out again. "I stood in that flat with the bruises on your arms and I told you to pack a bag. I took you to London with nothing but the clothes on your back. And then you just... went quiet on me." Rory looked down at the scar on her left wrist, the pale crescent that had never quite faded. She turned it toward the light out of habit. "You should have let me stay in the car that night." "Don't you say that." "I'm saying it because it's true." Eva raised her hand and then let it drop onto the bar, the gold band catching the green glow. "I got married last spring. Her name's Imogen. She teaches sixth form chemistry in Islington. She knows about you. She asked me once if I missed Cardiff, and I said there's nothing there I miss except the girl who used to sit on the wall outside the library and finish my sandwiches." "Eva." "Don't Eva me. I'm not here to make you feel better." "Then why are you here?" Eva met her eyes, and for the first time since she had stood up from her stool, she looked her age. "Because I saw your name in the local paper last month. A delivery driver put out a fire in a kitchen in Chinatown. They printed your picture. You looked like someone I used to know, and I thought, if I don't go and see for myself, I'll spend the rest of my life wondering." Rory set the glass down. Above them, a floorboard creaked in the flat she rented, the one that sat above the bar, and she heard her own footsteps in it that morning, quiet and careful, the way she always walked when she wasn't sure who else was listening. "Well," she said. "Now you've seen."