Page 17 of Meet Me in Another Life

Santi looks troubled. Thora realizes what it means, and theground falls out from underneath her. “Oh, shit. I’m an idiot. I’m completely assuming you’re still interested. You’ve probably got a girlfriend now, or you’ve become a monk, or—”

He shakes his head, still serious. “It’s okay. I can quit monk training anytime.”

Thora nods slowly. She takes one sip of the tea. Then she puts it down on the worktop and pulls him into her arms.

She moves in immediately: another first. She tells her parents over dinner. Her father says nothing. Her mother asks if she’s thought this through.

“No,” she says cheerfully. “Not at all. Isn’t that great? You know, once in your lives, maybe you should try not thinking something through. Not interrogating it from multiple angles. Not figuring out the deeper connotations. Just—letting it happen. How about it?”

No answer. Thora wishes for a heartfelt second that she had a sibling to soak up some of their patient, dissolving regard.

She blinks. “Well,” she says, getting up and gathering the dishes. “Good talk.”

“How was dinner?” Santi asks as she comes home, tripping over Félicette at the door.

She blows a raspberry and sits down on the sofa. “Trying to tell my parents anything is like—I don’t know. Confessing to a skeptical wall.”

Santi smiles and brings her a glass of wine. “I feel like I know them already.”

Thora leans into him, resting her head against his. “This’ll never work, you know,” she says conversationally.

Santi frowns at her. “Who says?”

“All my exes. Most recently, my ex-girlfriend Jules. She told me when we broke up what my problem is.”

“What’s your problem?”

“I always want somewhere else. I’m never just—content to be where I am.”

He shrugs. “Neither am I.”

She gives him a look. “What do you mean? You’re, like, Mr. Serenity.”

A smile cracks his face. “That may be what it looks like on the outside. But inside, I’m always searching.” He strokes her cheek, tucks her hair behind her ear. “We’re the same, that way.”

Thora thinks of her loneliness, of Jules and the girlfriends and boyfriends who came before her, all of them feeling like ghosts in the end. She looks now for the same transparency in Santi, but he is solid: a thing that proves its existence by blocking the light. “So, what’s the plan?” she asks, half-laughing. “We’ll be discontent together?”

He smiles. “Better than being discontent alone.”

When he proposes to her, she’s angry.

He doesn’t understand. “I thought this was what you wanted,” he says, getting up from his knees.

She opens her mouth. “It is.”

“Then why do you look like I just slapped you?”

“I don’t know.” She crosses her arms. “It just feels—strange.”

“Strange,” he says, his voice tense with patience. He’s still holding the ring.

“Put that away,” Thora says. “You look like a ringmaster in a flea circus.”

He looks down, confused, then laughs. He pockets the ringand comes to her, taking her hands. “Please,” he says. “Help me understand.”

Thora sighs. “How did we meet?”

“You’re telling me you don’t remember?”

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