Page 22 of Meet Me in Another Life

He stares at her, uncomprehending. He wants to scream at her, to ask her why. Who takes offered love and burns it? The social worker’s voice again.She will try and test your boundaries.

“You’re lucky you didn’t burn the house down,” he says.

“Or unlucky,” she shoots back. “Perspective is everything.”

There have to be consequences. Otherwise, she will think there is nothing she can’t do. And that won’t help her become who she needs to be.Another breath. “You will learn how to crochet, and you will fix this. I don’t care how long it takes. When you get home from school tomorrow, we start.”

She snorts. “I can’t make something like that.”

“Is that why you did it? Because you don’t think you can make something beautiful?”

“No. I told you why.”

Santi feels like he is drowning, like he can’t get enough air into his lungs. “You will learn. Starting tomorrow.” He goes to the door. It’s imperative he not give her the last word.

“I hate you,” she says, with a venom lifetimes older than her years.

He does a lousy job keeping his expression neutral. “Well, that’s a shame, because I love you.”

“How? How do you love me?” Her face screws up. “You don’t even know me. I just—arrived in your house, and now it’s your job to pretend to be my dad. It’s okay. I understand. You probably thought you’d get some sweet little girl who’d be easy to love. But you don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not lying.” He can’t keep the emotion out of his voice.Calm, he thinks, but it’s useless, like trying to pin down a hurricane. “I don’t say things I don’t mean. I loved you before I met you.”

She stares at him. “That’s impossible.”

He shrugs. “I don’t care. It’s true.”

She gropes for words, her fingers digging into the bedcover. “That’s not how love works. You don’t just love someone for no reason. You love them for who they are, or what they do, or how they look. They have to deserve it.”

A minor epiphany: this is what she wants, an argument. “And then you stop loving them if they stop being that way? If they stop deserving it?”

Thora looks like she’s finally on solid ground. “Yes,” she says defiantly.

Santi shakes his head. “Thora, no. If love was something we had to deserve, we would all be loveless. No, love is what the world owes us.” He gives her an apologetic smile. “Sometimes, it doesn’t pay up, that’s all.”

She looks at him in abject fury. For a blistering instant, Santi feels her fury move into him, become his own. He believes God has given him this purpose: that on some level, he is here to save her. But what does it mean that his purpose depends on Thora’s misery? If love is what she is owed, how can he make up the world-heavy weight of the unpaid balance?

He chooses that moment to retreat to the kitchen. He doesn’t feel like he’s won. He feels like he’s limping away from a skirmish, lucky to escape with his life.

Héloïse comes in, still in her hospital scrubs. She pauses, keys in her hand. “You’re biting your nails again.” Santi looks down at his fingers. A habit he thought he’d beaten thirty years ago, creeping back like a ghost. Héloïse closes the door behind her. “You shouldn’t do that in front of Thora.”

He laughs under his breath. “You really think I can influence anything she does?”

Héloïse shrugs off her coat, opens the fridge on her way to the table, and deposits a beer in front of Santi.

He opens the beer and takes a swig. “How did you know?” he asks.

“Because I know you. You live your whole life like you’re being tested. And you want to pass with flying colors.” She kisses his forehead, smooths his unruly hair. “But this isn’t an exam. There’s no pass mark. All we can do is fail her less badly than she’s been failed before.”

He starts teaching Thora crochet the next day. She’s deliberately clumsy with it; after ten minutes, she refuses to do any more. Santi measures their progress not in the square she’s working on, which grows by slow centimeters and shrinks at almost thesame rate as she unpicks wrong stitches. He measures it instead in words hurled, points scored. Even if all they’re building is a war, they’re building it together.

Before she’s even close to being able to fix the blanket, she starts sneaking food from the kitchen. Héloïse and Santi stand in Thora’s room like detectives at a crime scene, looking down at the evidence stashed in a tin under the bed. Biscuits, bags of crisps, a wrinkled apple, a chocolate bar divided into individually wrapped pieces. Santi can’t help seeing them as military rations. Along the windowsill, he counts thirteen glasses of water in various states of half-full. He flicks them in sequence, freeing an eccentric tune.

“She’s living like a hunted animal,” says Héloïse quietly, although they are safe: Thora is out with Lily, the only friend she’s made so far. “Should we take all this away?”

Santi closes the tin and pushes it back under the bed. “No. We need her to know she’s safe.” He carefully puts back the papers he found next to it, hand-drawn maps of impossible worlds.

Héloïse chews on her lip, an old habit that’s gotten worse in recent weeks. “Maybe she’ll never feel safe, not completely. Maybe everything that’s happened to her took that part of her away.”

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