He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Drita's POV
Drita's POV
The old man received me on Tuesday in the room where he had told two lies.
It was the study on Stillwell Avenue, with the dark wood and the crucifix and the photographs of men in the mountains.
He sat in a leather chair with a blanket across his knees and the cane leaning on the arm.
He looked smaller than he had at the forty-day table.
"Sit," Zef said.
"I'll stand."
"You have decided, then," he said.
"I have."
He folded his hands over the silver knob.
"Ermal's house is large," he said. "You would have the upstairs. A lock. I would give you my word."
"Your word."
"Yes."
"Zef," I said. "There is no girl in Tirana."
He did not move.
The clock on the shelf ticked four times.
Something went across his face and was gone, and under it his skin went gray and slack.
"Lule talks too much," he said.
"Lule carried two messages for two years. She put one down."
"It was a kindness to him."
"It was a theft," I said. "You took two years off two people who never did anything to you."
"You were a girl at a register. He was a man with a table."
"And now he has neither," I said. "And I am sitting at the other one."
His eyes came up, pale and hard.
"I am offering you a roof and my son's name," he said.
"I have a roof and a name. Both of them are better than yours."
I walked to the door.
"Drita."
I turned.
"The table decides on the last day," he said. "Not you. Not him. The table."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Lost His Place Protecting Me, So I Took the Whole Family are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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