Chapter 20
Matej
They eat standing at the kitchen counter.
Fanika’s bread, the last of it, and whatever was left from the morning, some hard cheese, an apple Luca cuts with the small knife he has appropriated from the second drawer.
Neither of them says much. There is nothing uncomfortable in this.
The kitchen is warm and the light is low and something has settled between them that doesn’t need language yet.
Matej watches Luca eat. Watches his hands. The same hands that were — he sets the thought aside. Eats his bread.
Later they move to the fire.
It starts with nothing. Luca’s feet on the cushion beside him, Matej’s arm along the back of the couch, the fire doing what fires do when you leave them to it, low, reliable, not needing anything from you.
Outside the plateau has shifted into its evening register, finding every gap in old stone. Inside it is warm and still.
Luca asks, eventually, not a direct question, more like leaving space, about the Vuelta a Burgos. The year.
Matej is quiet.
“2013,” he says. Then: “Everything was still possible in 2013.”
He doesn’t mean it as a dramatic statement. Just a fact about that year, before the years that followed it, before everything that came with them.
Luca waits. He has learned to wait.
“There was a manager,” Matej says. “Handled logistics, contracts, some of the training structure. Worked with half the teams in the country at different points. Good at his job.” He pauses. “We all knew him. Trusted him. You didn’t think about it — you just did.”
He reaches for his glass. Sets it back down without drinking.
“2019. Two names from the national circuit in the papers. Operation Aderlass — Austrian investigation, blood doping network, but the edges reached everywhere. The manager’s name came up. And then anyone connected to the manager.”
“Your name,” Luca says. Quietly. Not a question.
“One sentence. One sentence in a document that was about other people.” His voice stays level. “No positive test. No evidence. One sentence.”
The fire shifts.
“The team suspended me pending review. Standard procedure, they said. Temporary, they said.” He stops. “Nobody called. Not one person called.”
The glass stays where he set it down. He does not reach for it again. Luca is still.
He says it plainly, without reaching for sympathy. Which makes it worse. The plainness of it.
“I trained anyway,” he says. “Alone. Too hard. I thought if I could just — show them. If the numbers were right. If I was good enough.”
“That was the mistake.”
Luca says nothing. His hand finds Matej’s arm and stays there.
“Girona. Early morning, wet road. I was tired in a way I hadn’t let myself notice.” He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to. “Shoulder. Collarbone. Knee. And that was that.”
“And Théo,” Matej says — not as a new subject, as a continuation. “He stayed longer than he should have. While I was — not reachable. You understand. I wasn’t there even when I was there.” He looks at the fire. “He left because I left first. I know that.”
“Where is he now,” Luca asks.
“Jura. His family’s place. Making Comté.” Something almost like a smile. “He showed me his family’s cave once. Kalkstein, like here. Rows of wheels in the dark, that smell — you know it now.” He pauses. “He just stood inside and waited. Didn’t explain anything. Let me find my own way in.”
Luca does not move his hand. He has had it on Matej’s arm since the manager, and he leaves it there now, through this, the way you hold still for an animal that has decided to trust you and could change its mind.
He’s quiet.
“I went back there. A few years later. Not as — not for him. As a student. His family took me in, no questions.” He looks at his hands. “And then Vermont. And then I came home.”
Luca doesn’t move.
“There was a cave here already,” Matej says.
“Under the hill. My father never used it for anything. I started thinking about it.” He pauses.
“I thought — they took everything else. The career, the name, the version of myself I’d been building since I was fourteen.
Fine. Fuck them. I’ll build something they can’t touch.
Something that takes years and lives in the ground and gets better the longer you leave it alone. ”
The fire takes the end of it. He has not spoken this much at once since Luca has known him, and he lets the quiet close over it rather than reach after the words.
He says fuck them as he says everything else — without heat, as simple fact. Which makes it land harder than if he’d shouted it.
“And here you are,” Luca says.
“And here I am.”
“A bit beaten up,” Matej says. “But here.”
Luca turns his head to look at him.
“With me,” he says.
Matej looks back. His face does the thing, the thing just before the smile, when something has landed and is real.
“Yes,” he says. “The Bora carried you to me.”
He says it simply, without irony. The Kras way of saying: you are not an accident. You are what this wind does.
Luca is quiet. Then: “I don’t know what I’m building.
” Matej looks at him. “You build things,” Luca says.
“The cheese, the cave, the farm. Something that takes years and gets better the more you put into it.” He looks at the fire.
“I write pieces. They come out and people read them and then they’re gone.
I’ve been doing it for twelve years and I don’t know what I have to show for it.
” He stops. It’s more than he meant to say.
“Sorry. Your story is better.” Matej is quiet.
Then: “It’s not a competition.” “No,” Luca says. “I know.”
Luca looks at the fire.
He is aware, uncomfortably, of what is in his bag.
The key. Just the key — old metal, the crest he has turned over in his fingers a hundred times since Trieste, since his father’s things, since before he arrived here and knew any of this.
The farm. The cave. The cheese. The man sitting next to him who just said they took everything and fuck them and the Bora carried you to me in the same flat, true voice.
He has been meaning to tell him. He has been meaning to tell him since the first week, and then since the second, and now it is week six and Matej has just opened every door he keeps closed and handed him what was behind each one, and Luca is sitting here with a key in his bag that belongs to a story Matej doesn’t know Luca is carrying.
It is not a terrible thing, he tells himself. It is just a thing he hasn’t said yet.
But he thinks about the manager. The one sentence. Nobody called.
He thinks about how Matej said trusted him — past tense, the cleanest past tense he has heard in any language.
He doesn’t think about tomorrow. He thinks about this room. This fire. This hand at his back, warm and still, not asking anything.
The fire goes low. At some point they move — upstairs, without discussing it, as things happen here. Luca lies in the dark, Matej’s warmth beside him, and the word tomorrow is somewhere in him, patient, not yet a plan.