Chapter 21: Her Own Key

Ariella's POV

My boss rented me the room over the bakery for six hundred dollars a month.

She slid the lease across the counter on Monday, with a pen laid across it.

I looked at the pen.

Then I picked up the paper and read it, every word, standing at the register with the morning line waiting.

"You don't have to do that," she said. "It's one page."

"I know." I turned it over. "I always do it twice."

I read it twice.

It said rent, and a deposit of one month, and no pets. It said I could leave with thirty days' notice.

There was nothing in the corners.

I signed my name on the line, and my hand was steady.

"There," my boss said gruffly, and put the lease in her drawer. "Now go and open the case."

Lark came after her shift with her mother's ladder, a roll of paint tape and a bottle of cheap wine.

The room was small and square, with a slanted ceiling and one window over Orchard Street.

It had a bed frame, a counter, a two-burner stove and a bathroom with a tub on feet.

It smelled like warm bread, always.

"This is yours," Lark said, turning in the middle of the floor. "All yours. You have a lease."

"I read it."

"I know you read it. You read the cereal box." She dropped onto the bed. "I'm so proud of you I could throw up."

"Please don't."

"What does Mr. Murder say?"

"I haven't told him."

"Ari."

"I'm telling him tonight." I sat beside her. "I'm going to ask him to knock."

She stared at me.

"Like a regular man."

"Like a guest."

Lark put her arm around my shoulders.

"He'll cry," she said. "I want to be there."

"You can't be there."

"I'll be in the stairwell."

I laughed so hard I had to lie down.

At nine o'clock someone knocked on the street door downstairs.

Two knocks, a pause, and a third.

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