LAMIAE

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE: CONFESSION

"But they didn't do anything to you?" she asked.

"No, they can't do anything to me anymore," he replied. When asked if her friend was fully aware of the fact that he was talking to her about his life, she would simply say no.

"Where were you?"

The boy looked at her quite consciously and for a moment he looked as if he wanted to leave, scared by what he had already said. However, he gave up this idea. Slightly swaying on his feet, he slid down the wall, finally sitting on the floor.

„I couldn't find auntie, but you probably don't know where she is..."

"She made me dinner about fifteen minutes ago, then I saw her in the living room," for the first time she was happy that she had an idea where her grandmother was.

"She was neither in the living room, nor in the kitchen, nor in the courtyard, anywhere."

"Then she must have gone shopping or something," Dagmara reasoned, but Casper had a different opinion.

"No, Alan said he talked to her on the phone. She had to do something, I thought she mentioned something to you before she left."

Of everything he said, only one thing intrigued her. And it wasn't the trust given to her by her grandmother, according to which her grandmother left her and the boy ALONE in her house. What interested her was Alan, who had kept getting in her way for the past few days.

"Alan? Have you seen Alan?"

"Yes, because you see, the place where I lived before was his block."

"Can you explain it?," she asked, frowning.

"Alan lives in a block of flats in the Northanger Abbey housing association. However, this block and the luxurious apartments inside belong entirely to his parents. He rents apartments to his friends, I was one of them."

"And his parents agree to this?" she asked, although she would even prefer to hear how the two of them "became friends".

Casper smiled a little.

"They can afford to leave the block completely empty. Alan doesn't want to live alone, so he rents it out for half the price to his friends, I don't even know if his parents know about it. They stay abroad all the time."

Dagmara bit her lip until it bled. Is it possible that not a man from Romania killed Victoria, but Alan, for example? Otherwise, why did Casper move out of the apartment and live with her grandmother, finding there, as he said, the shelter he needed? Why does she have the impression that boys don't like each other? And the biggest unknown. Is it possible that Alan and his friends are THEY from the poem found in Casper's room?

"You had a fight with Alan," the girl muttered, sitting down on the floor next to the boy. She leaned against the cold wall.

"Since Victoria's death, we have no longer been able to talk normally," her fears turned out to be true. She didn't want to push him too intrusively into that event, but yesterday he had promised that one day he would tell her everything. "This is not the moment yet," only now did she notice how carefully he was studying her face. He had to guess what she had just thought.

"I understand, but answer me one question," she began, choosing her next words carefully. "Was it because of Alan that Victoria died? Do you blame him for this?"

He looked away, embarrassed, now staring at the wall opposite. Even with the space between them, she could feel the battle raging inside him. A fight over whether to speak or remain silent.

She also wondered whether to go further, because once "a" was said, it was "b" turn, but she didn't want to sound vulgar, and how else could this sentence sound? How not to ask rudely: Did he kill her? The description of the murderer from Romania was his complete opposite.

"Yes, I blame him," he finally spoke, after a long pause. There was such silence that it seemed to her that the only sound in the hall and in the entire mansion was her loudly beating heart. "Even though he wasn't the one who dealt her the fatal blow, I blame him. Because he could have helped me, but he didn't. Wednesday..." he chuckled to himself, the way a madman sometimes chuckles to himself. "Some people say they hate Mondays. I hate Wednesdays, it was so close to midnight, until another year... And she didn't make it. I think I've even heard the countdown on the streets. Ten... nine... eight..."

Dagmara felt goose bumps on her skin. Casper's voice dropped to a whisper.

"Six... five..."

The fact that there was no light in the corridor, the fact that Casper was acting like a madman, all this made her see this moment in her mind. She really saw it.

"Dead..."

"You were going home, right?"

"Did I tell you it happened in the cemetery?" Casper ignored her question, asking one of his own, even though he still seemed to be much more interested in the wall than in her. "What an irony, to die in a cemetery. We were going home. There's a shortcut there, you can get to auntie's residence faster if you know which way to go. Maybe if I took the car it would be different. We shouldn't go out on the street at all. Not then."

"You don't need to torment yourself," Dagmara added her opinion. "I know it's hard to believe, but maybe it had to be that way."

"Are you saying she had to die?" Casper suddenly perked up. His eyes were burning; she saw that he didn't like her words. "In the name of what higher idea? Has he been caught, her murderer? Was a book written about her sacrifice? No, no, no," he calculated. "She should live."

Dagmara pulled her legs up to her chin and leaned on them. She understood his pain, she understood it so well...

"I couldn't come to terms with my mother's death either," she was aware that he looked at her and knew that he had forgotten that she had also recently lost someone. "There are people who come into our lives and bring light to it. And even when they are no longer with us, their light surrounds us, illuminates not only a part of our path, but also helps us, protects us, and makes us feel safe. My mother spread nothing but kindness around. When she died, everything stopped making sense, it suddenly became black, dirty and sad."

"And you still believe that this had to happen?"

She shrugged slightly:

"I know that this had to happen for me to meet my grandmother. I've only seen her a few times so far, and mostly when I was little. In Warsaw, I probably wouldn't even recognize her on the street. If my mother were alive, I wouldn't have known Kielce, I wouldn't have known you, Arleta. Maybe it all makes sense, we're just not looking carefully. For example... did Victoria's death make you realize anything? Was her death necessary for something?"

He didn't speak for a few minutes. In fact, he wasn't even moving, and if it weren't for the fact that he was undoubtedly breathing, she would have thought that he, too, was dead. He seemed to be thinking about an answer, but if he developed it, he must have done it only inside himself, because all she heard was a concise one:

"Yes."