But they did not. “You again,” I said to Krys when we were well away from the alley. I tried to sound annoyed. “Are you following me?”

“Hardly,” he replied. “I work in this neighborhood, at the dock with my father and a bit at the café in exchange for the flat above it where I’m staying. This isn’t your part of the city, though. Cherries again?”

He was trying to be humorous, but I did not smile. “Something like that. I come to the market sometimes for errands.”

“You shouldn’t,” he replied bluntly. “Wandering the city, it’s dangerous. You have to be more careful,” he scolded, as though talking to a child.

I stopped walking and turned to face him. “Why should you care?” I flared. He stepped back as if genuinely surprised by my outburst. “You left me. You didn’t even tell me you were back.” I hadn’t meant to confront him, but now that the words had come out, I wanted answers. “Why?”

“Shh. Not here.” He took my arm and led me down the busy street, away from the shops and the houses, in the direction of the industrial buildings and warehouses by the river. “I’ve wanted to come see you,” he said at last when we were alone on the banks of the Wisła and could not be heard. “I tried to explain when I saw you here a few weeks ago, but you ran away.”

I turned to face him, put my hands on my hips. “I’m here now. So tell me.”

He looked over his shoulder before speaking, as if even here on the riverbank, which was deserted but for some disinterested ducks, someone might be listening. “Ella, I wasn’t gone all of that time because of the army. At least not the army you know.”

“I don’t understand.” Had he been lying about everything?

“I really did enlist and go off to fight.” In my mind, I saw him at the rail station Kraków Główny the day he left, so proud and hopeful in his new uniform, winking at me before boarding the train. “But then Poland was defeated and something else happened. Have you heard of the Home Army?” I nodded. It was rumored early in the war that a group of Polish men had organized to fight the Germans and I had since heard claims that they engaged in acts of sabotage. But as the occupation continued undaunted, resistance seemed surreal, the stuff of fairy tales or legends.

“You see, when it became clear that Poland was going to lose in combat, another soldier told me about an underground army that was forming,” Krys said. “I heard about the work they were going to do, and I knew I needed to be a part of it. There was nothing more to be done on the battlefield; secret operations were our only hope. So I started working with a small group to fight the Germans. Later we joined forces with other similar organizations to form the Polish Home Army.”