Page 18 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Not every question needs a straight answer, Santi.”

He frowns. “You’re saying there’s something wrong with the way we met?”

“No. I mean—yes. What if Brigitta hadn’t sent my wine to the wrong table? What if she had mixed your drink up with someone else’s instead of mine?”

“Then I’d be proposing to Holger right now.” Thora doesn’t laugh. He stares at her, the beginnings of panic in his eyes. “But she didn’t.”

“Right!” Thora exclaims, like he’s proved her point. “And our whole lives, down to—this,” she says, gesturing hugely at the ring, “hinge on that. Something so stupid, so arbitrary.”

Santi folds his arms. “You know I don’t think it was arbitrary.”

Thora casts her eyes upward. “So you’re proposing to me because you think God wants you to? That just makes it worse. How can you not see how that makes it worse?”

He is unflappable, relentless, a lake that absorbs every stone. “I feel like I’ve spent my life waiting for a sign,” he says. “For something I could be sure of.”

“Please don’t,” Thora says, but he goes on.

“Nothing made sense until you. And then you disappeared, and I—” He laughs, with a desperate edge. “I felt like a crazy person. Being so sure something was right, and then being wrong, I—I felt like God was playing a trick on me.” The fear in his eyes is exactly what Thora has been running from. “You’re afraid because you don’t feel the same,” he says.

“No. I’m afraid because I do.” To his baffled look, she says,“But I don’t think that should be possible! That’s why I don’t trust it.”

“I—” Santi stops. “Let’s forget about fate for a second. Deal?”

She nods. “Deal.”

He comes to her. Sometimes, in their arguments, words no longer reach her: what she needs is his hands, and his attention, and his eyes looking into hers. It slows time to a manageable pace, makes her feel less like a careening top on the verge of falling.

“I am proposing,” he says, “because I love you. I love your mind, I love your body, I love your infuriating skepticism and your need for space. I love the way you throw your head back when you laugh. And I don’t want to ever be without you.”

She blinks. “Right,” she says. “Well, I can certainly get behind that.”

They get married in Great St. Martin’s, the church that looks like a fairy-tale castle tucked behind the pastel-colored houses of the waterfront. Jaime, Santi’s friend from work, is his best man; Lily is Thora’s maid of honor. As they come out of the church, the bells in the tower are ringing. Thora feels like she’s ringing too, picking up a vibration and humming with it until it threatens to shatter her. She lets it spill out of her in bursts of laughter.

They have their reception at the Odysseum. Their guests roam the pretend planetarium, eating freeze-dried canapes under the glassy gazes of ghostly astronauts. It’s as funny as Thora hoped it would be, especially when the dancing starts. She spins with Lily, throwing her head back as she laughs. In one corner, her father is trying to talk to Santi’s father in Latin, and in another, Aurelia is laughing at them both, and in another, Santi is watching her, his whole heart in his eyes.

The next day, Thora slips out of the flat early without waking him. He’s still a light sleeper, but the hangover has sent him deep enough that he doesn’t stir. She walks in the opposite direction she walked the last time she left him, into the heart of the city. At the ruined clock tower, opposite the place where they met for the first time, she takes a permanent marker from her pocket. NO GOING BACK, she writes on the wall. She has made her choice. She’s still afraid.

She never expected what being happy would do to time. It speeds up, sliding away under her fingers, distorting into fantastic shapes. She tries to cling to every moment. Coming home after the sci-fi festival and arguing so loudly about the ending of the last film that the neighbors call the police. Santi singing to himself in the kitchen, doodling tiny versions of the two of them on the table until it forms an imperfect record of their lives. Her Spanish getting hesitantly better, until she manages a joke that makes his father laugh for half an hour. Santi bringing her cookies at Christmas as she sits watching the snow fall, pregnant and lazy.

“My love,” he says.

She just stares at him, the impossibility of him. “There shouldn’t have been room for this,” she says.

“What?”

“In the time we’ve known each other. There shouldn’t have been—this shouldn’t be possible.”

“What?” he says again, with a smile.

For me to love you this much.It frustrates her, as his proposal frustrated her, triggering a deep sense of not understanding. Thora likes to understand. But she can’t say it. He knows. He has to know.

“Nothing.” She grabs a cookie and stuffs it in her mouth.

Estela is born in January, on a long night that pain stretches into forever. Santi yells at the doctors—she’s hurting, can’t you see, aren’t you supposed to stop it?Thora screams every swear word she can remember in Czech and Icelandic and English. Finally, all words are gone and she’s nothing but a stretched arc of agony. She loses sight of him then, even as he’s gripping her hand. He comes back to her in waves, after they’ve taken the baby away to clean her up: his hands first, then his eyes, warm and so afraid.

“Not fair,” she murmurs.

He leans close. “What’s not fair?”

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