Chapter 6
Krystyna and Bartosz.
They told me their names on the drive. The words meant nothing to me yet. Names rarely do the first time you hear them. At first, they’re just sounds, and only later, sometimes much later, do they gather consequence around them.
Krystyna turned in the passenger seat to look at me and smiled in a way that suggested she had practiced smiling for children before. That unsettled me, though I could not have said why.
Even then, I noticed rehearsed warmth. Funny what children pick up. Adults often mistake innocence for inattention.
Her makeup was heavy, too heavy. Foundation lay thick across her face like a mask beginning to settle into the fine lines around her mouth. There was something over-arranged about her, as if every visible part of her had been decided in advance.
When she leaned closer, I caught her perfume. Sweet, but wrong. Cheap in a way that lingered too long in the warm air. The sort of scent that arrives before a person and stays after they’ve left.
I remember thinking, in the blunt way children think, that she smelled expensive and poor at the same time. There’s a joke in that somewhere.
Bartosz didn’t turn at all. He kept his eyes on the road.
From the backseat, he looked enormous to me, broad shoulders filling the driver’s seat, thick hands resting on the wheel as though they belonged there. There was something almost carved about him.
When he finally looked at me in the rearview mirror, the eye contact lasted only a second, but it was long enough.
There are people whose eyes feel like rooms you shouldn’t enter. His had that quality. And strangely, it eased me a little.Disinterest is predictable. Disinterest tends to leave you alone. At that age, that could feel close to safety.
Krystyna, on the other hand, was very interested in me.
She kept looking back. Not constantly, but often enough that I noticed, and I noticed because children who grow up watched tend to become watchers themselves.
Her gaze lingered a little too long each time it settled, as though she were measuring something. At eleven, I didn’t have the vocabulary for unease, but instinct rarely waits for vocabulary. The body often knows long before thought catches up. Something in the way she looked at me felt off. I could not have told you why. Only that a part of me, small and old already, had begun paying attention. And still, mixed with that unease, there was excitement. Which is often how danger first enters, wearing enough promise that your suspicion hesitates. There’s dark humor in that, too.
When the staff member had told Krystyna that I didn’t speak, her smile widened.
“Oh, that’s perfectly fine,”she said, waving her hand as if dismissing the idea entirely. Her voice was soft, almost playful.
“You know,”she added, turning toward me again,
“words aren’t always necessary.”Her eyes met mine.
“Sometimes eyes can say much more.”
The house they lived in looked normal.
When people imagine the beginning of something terrible, they expect warning signs. Cracked walls, rotting floors, something visually wrong with the place itself. But the house Krystyna and Bartosz lived in looked like every other middle-class house in that neighborhood. Two floors, pale plaster walls, a narrow garden bordered by a metal fence that had been painted recently enough that the color still looked new.
Even the street felt ordinary. A quiet neighborhood where the air smelled faintly of damp soil and distant wood smoke from someone's chimney.
When Bartosz pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, the silence that followed felt strangely peaceful. Krystyna stepped out first.
“Come,”she said gently.
I followed them inside.
The moment the door opened, the smell of the house reached me. The smell of warm food from the breakfast they probably had earlier, cleaning products, something faintly floral that I realized must have been the same perfume Krystyna wore, lingering in the air like a second presence.
The floor beneath my shoes was smooth wood instead of linoleum. That alone felt like an improvement.
There was a small rug by the door where shoes had clearly been placed many times before. A coat rack leaned against the wall with two jackets hanging neatly from its hooks. Nothing about the place felt threatening. If anything, it felt… calm. Safe, even. My fingers brushed lightly along the wall as I moved further inside. I wasn’t thinking about it consciously; it was instinct.
The plaster was cool beneath my fingertips. Real houses have textures that institutions don’t. Small imperfections in the walls, slight creaks in the floorboards, the subtle scent of everyday life layered into the air over time.
