Chapter 23: Ask Me

Nika's POV

Luka took his father's chair at noon, and I sat on his right.

He lasted nine minutes. Then he leaned toward me and asked, very quietly, whether he could please go home.

The elders heard him. One of them coughed into his sleeve.

"The table is adjourned," said the eldest elder, and tapped his cane.

We did not go to Luka's house.

At six that evening we stood on the sidewalk below my flat.

The bakery downstairs smelled of warm bread, and neither of us moved.

Luka had a key to my door. He had had it for twenty months.

He took it out of his pocket and held it in his palm.

"May I come up?" he said.

I looked at the key. I looked at him.

"You've never asked me that."

"I know."

"You've never once knocked."

"I know," Luka said. His ears were red. "I'm trying to learn."

"Come up."

He climbed the stairs behind me, and he waited on the landing while I unlocked my own door.

The flat was small and neat, and it smelled of the bakery and of the dried lavender I kept in a jar.

It was the cover I had built for him. A kettle, a quilt, two plates, a calendar from the florist.

He stood in the middle of the room and looked at everything slowly.

"It's very clean," he said.

"I'm a very good florist."

He laughed.

Then he looked at the bedroom door, and his face changed.

"Nika," he said. "The case."

For twenty months he had gone through my purse and my coat and my phone.

He had never touched the black case under my bed. I had stopped being surprised, and I had never stopped noticing.

"What about it?"

"I know what's in it. I've always known. I want to ask whether I can see."

He said it so plainly that I could not answer for a moment.

I went into the bedroom.

I knelt and slid the case out from under the bed.

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