Run: 2026-10-08-01M4E0G4J0AR5MR3CDZD4H05TK

The green neon above the door buzzed the way it always did, a half-second stutter before it steadied, and Rory watched it through the window while she waited for Silas to pour her second whisky. Rain had flattened Soho's pavements into mirrors. Somewhere behind her a cab hissed through a puddle. "You're staring at the sign again," Silas said, setting the glass on a coaster with a precision that suggested he had once been paid to notice where things sat. "It's not going to fix itself." "It's fine. It's the only thing in this place that still looks like it's trying." He huffed, which from Silas counted as laughter, and limped off down the bar toward the taps. The bookshelf at the back of the room stood where it always stood, crammed with spines nobody read, and the old maps on the walls kept their silent watch over the regulars. Rory had been coming here for three years and had learned not to ask which of the photographs were real. The door opened. Cold air came in first, then a woman shaking water from a camel coat, and Rory's hand went still around the glass before her mind caught up with the rest of her. Eva had cut her hair. The long dark plait that had hung down her back through every school photo Rory owned now stopped at the jaw, bleached the colour of old piano keys, sharp enough to look deliberate. She wore the coat like armour. Her left hand, when she pushed the door shut behind her, held no ring, and the absence registered with Rory faster than she wanted it to. Eva saw her in the mirror behind the optics. Their eyes met in the glass, and for a long second neither of them moved. "Well," Eva said, turning around. "Of all the bars in London." "You're not supposed to be in London." "Neither are you, apparently. Last I heard, you were in a flat above a bar and too busy to answer your phone." Rory took a sip she did not want. "Who told you that?" "Your mum. She rang me on my birthday. Thought I'd want to know my best friend had vanished into the city and left her a voicemail about the weather." Eva slid onto the stool two down, deliberately not the one beside her. "Is this the place? The one with the neon?" "You found it without a map." "I found it because the bloke at the station asked if I was lost, and I said I was looking for a green sign, and he said the Nest, love, everyone knows the Nest." Eva tapped the bar twice with a nail painted black. "I didn't know everyone knew it. That's a bit depressing." Silas came back down the bar, took one look at Eva, and set a glass of soda water in front of her without asking. She eyed it. "I didn't order that." "You look like you'll need to drive later," Silas said. "I'm Silas. I own the place. Rory's the only one who pays her tab on time, so you'll forgive me if I'm fond of her." "You're fond of me because I carry your deliveries up the stairs," Rory said. "That too." Eva lifted the soda water and studied Rory over the rim. "You have the flat above here?" "Three rooms and a radiator that only works when it feels like it." "You always said you'd end up somewhere with a view of something other than a wall." "I said a lot of things." "You did." Eva put the glass down. Her voice flattened, the way it used to when she was about to say something she had rehearsed on the train. "You said you'd come back for the summer. You said you'd come back for Christmas. Then you said you'd come back when things were sorted, and I stopped asking what sorted meant." Silas moved to the far end of the bar and became very interested in a lemon. Rory turned her glass in a slow circle. The ring it left on the wood was faint and pale. "I didn't know how to come back and not drag everything behind me." "Everything being him?" "Everything being all of it." Rory lifted her gaze. "You're the one who put me on the train, Eva. You're the one who said get out or he'll finish what he started. I got out. I didn't realise I'd have to keep getting out." Eva's mouth tightened. For a moment she looked exactly like the girl who had once climbed the wall behind the primary school to retrieve Rory's lost hat and come down with bloody knees and no apology. Then the look was gone, and the woman in the camel coat was back. "I didn't put you on the train for you to disappear," she said quietly. "I put you on it so you'd still be somewhere I could find you." "You found me." "Took me three years and a cab driver with a good memory." Rory laughed, and it surprised her, a short rusty sound that made the man at the corner table glance up from his newspaper. "You haven't changed at all." "Liar." Eva's fingers went to the bare place on her hand, then stopped, as though she had caught herself at something. "I've changed a lot. You just weren't here to see it." The neon outside buzzed and steadied again. Rory looked at the stranger in the glass behind the bottles, her own reflection overlaid with the bleached-blonde edge of her friend's new haircut, and found she could not decide which of them she was supposed to recognise.