You Are Not Rejecting Me novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Plate Outside the Door

Idris was sitting on the front steps of the lodge when I pulled in at one in the morning.

He had a plate on his knee with a dish towel over it.

He did not get up.

I shut off the engine and sat with my hands on the wheel.

Then I got out and stood in front of him in the gravel.

"I looked at them again," I said.

"And?"

"I can't see it."

"Okay."

"I want to see it. I tried."

My voice broke.

"She hugged me and cried, and she smelled like smoke, and I believed her."

"Okay," he said again.

He held out the plate.

"What's that?"

"Chicken and rice. I made too much."

"You always make too much."

"I make it for you."

I took the plate.

It was warm in my hands.

I stood there holding it, and something in me finally gave way.

"Why?" I said. "Why do you leave a plate outside my door every night?"

"Nia."

"It's been two years, and I've never asked."

He looked down at his hands.

"The first night after the Run, you didn't come down for dinner," he said. "I thought you were hungry and too proud to say it. So I left something."

"And the next night?"

"You didn't come down again. So I left it again."

He lifted his head.

"Seven hundred and thirty nights, Nia. You never once knocked on my door, until two nights ago."

His voice was rough.

"I stood in that hall for two years, waiting for you to knock."

I could not breathe.

"I thought you didn't want me to," I said.

"Why would you think that?"

"At the Run, when we were done, you looked at me and said, you could have run the other way."

His face changed.

"You thought I meant I wished you had."

"What else would you mean?"

"I meant you could have," he said. "I meant nobody was making you."

He swallowed.

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