Petya sat on the floor by the coffee table, one knee drawn up, a hoodie hanging loose on his lean frame. His dark hair stuck up in pieces. A bruise yellowed along his cheekbone, half-healed and badly hidden. Bills lay beside an empty noodle cup and the cracked mug where we kept quarters for laundry.
I closed the door behind me. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
He flinched.
“My battery died,” he said.
“Your phone is in your hand.”
He stared down at it as if it had betrayed him.
I took off my coat and hung it on the chair because the hook by the door had ripped out of the wall two weeks ago. My work shoes came off next. The relief was so sharp I had to put one hand on the wall.
“Gennady came into the lounge tonight,” I said.
Petya stood too fast. “Did he touch you?”
The anger in his voice was real. So was the fear under it.
“He grabbed my wrist in the booth. Later he cornered me by the service corridor.”
Petya’s face went gray. “Nadia.”
“He said three days.”
He stared at me, speechless.
I stepped over the frayed corner of the rug and picked up the stack of bills. “You told me two weeks.”
“I thought I could fix it before then.”
“With what?”
“I had a thing.”
“What thing?”
He rubbed both palms over his face. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t ask you for the truth after Gennady Kask put his hands on me at work?”
“I didn’t know he’d go there.”
“You knew exactly where I worked.”
Petya turned his face away.
The radiator hissed, then fell quiet. Cold crept around the window where the tape had peeled from the frame. On the sill, the basil plant I’d tried to keep alive had given up and gone brown.
I set the bills down one by one. “How much?”
He swallowed.
“How much, Petya?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Do you mean twenty-eight hundred?”
