Page 34 of Meet Me in Another Life

He reaches inside his jacket. Thora expects him to bring out a photograph. She already knows who it will show: a dark-skinned woman with thick braids and an uncertain smile. She waits, breathless, for him to prove her wrong. But Mr. López’s hand stays in his pocket, clinging to something.

He looks past her to the window, to a city the rain turns to a blurred mosaic. “I’m—a fatalist, I suppose you could say. I don’t believe it could have happened any differently. And I’ve found meaning in it. For it to have happened and not happened—for there to be a place where she is alive and still with me—no, with someone who is me and not me—it would make a mockery of everything I am.” He dashes tears from his eyes with one shaking hand.

Thora stares at him, wondering what is happening to her. Nothing is happening to her. The name, the image, are just random firings in her brain. Nothing to do with Mr. López or his dead wife.Prove it, a voice whispers.It would be easy. Say her name. Describe her and see how he reacts.But this conversation has already gone far enough. Her curiosity, however fierce, is not worth his distress.

“I’m sorry,” Thora says. “It’s not my place to... You’re my patient, I shouldn’t be speculating about alternative versions of your life. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

He takes in a sighing breath. “Perhaps it’s a gift. To be able to see the possibility of a better world.” His eyes fix her. “But I don’t believe it can work like you say, that we could step into it so easily. No. We have to work to make it.”

Thora lets the thought settle in her. It wakens a memory, like a vision seen in flames: sitting by her mother’s bedside after her stroke, desperate to reach into the machinery and make it work again. The desire that led her off the path she thought was hers and onto a new one. The path that eventually brought her here, to a ninth-floor treatment room on a rainy afternoon in Cologne: to an old man who is looking at her with infinite patience, as if their roles have been reversed.

“You are busy, Doctor,” Mr. López says. He opens the door. Thora has to fight the urge to ask him to stay. It burns her strangely that their time together is so limited.Don’t leave me alone in this, something in her cries.

“I’m not supposed to say this,” she tells him, “but you’re my favorite patient.”

Mr. López gives her a somber look. “If I am dying, please just tell me.”

She laughs. “Nah, you’ve got a good ten years in you yet. Five of those with working hands, if you keep doing as I say.” She takes his hand. As they shake, his gaze lingers on the tattoo on her wrist.

Thora holds the door for him. “See you next time,” she says.

He blinks at her, confusion flickering across his face. “Next time,” he agrees, and carefully pulls the door closed.

At the end of the day, Lily leans around the doorframe. “Boo. You almost finished? We’re going to Chlodwigplatz to join in the craziness, if you want to come.”

Carnival. A week of wild, drunken street parties, with the flimsy historical excuse of letting off steam before Lent. The idea of joining in makes Thora want to jump out of the ninth-floor window. She rubs her eyes as she switches her computer off. In the black mirror of the screen, her face looks lost. There’s a thought she can’t grasp, lingering in her mind like the smell of smoke in her hair. “Sorry, I can’t tonight.”

“Plans with Jules?”

“Jules is away. I have plans with the sofa and a tub of ice cream.” She looks through her fingers at Lily. “I know it’s antisocial. But—”

“But you’d rather watchContactfor the fiftieth time than hang out with us actual real humans. It’s okay. I get it.” Lily shakes her head, mock-offended. “Look after yourself,” she adds as she turns away.

Paths, Thora thinks, as Lily’s steps diminish down the corridor. Paths diverging again and again, infinite and terrifying. But hopeful too. Maybe she hasn’t trapped herself after all. Maybe it isn’t too late to seek a better world.

She locks the treatment room, wraps the scarf her father knitted around her neck, and heads down the stairs. Her phone rings. She sighs and picks up. “Hey, tati. How are you?”

“Oh, excellent, excellent.” Her father sounds drunk. “How are you?”

“Not bad. Just finished at work.” The automatic door lets herout into the spitting rain. “Had a bit of a weird conversation with a patient.”

He makes a dismissive noise. “Not surprising. They are all senile, your patients.”

No more senile than you.She hears the echo of her angry response, as if another Thora says it, but she makes a different choice. “Listen, I have to bike home now, but—I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Okay?”

A pause. “Yes. Okay. See you.”

The rain intensifies as she reaches her bike. She pulls up her hood and sets off, dodging a truck that nearly pushes her into a pothole. “Watch it!” she yells, in German, English, and Czech for good measure. That would have been a good ending to her little epiphany, she thinks. Killed in a bike accident.

As the rain eases off and the clouds begin to break, she cycles on through Neumarkt, skirting the Belgian Quarter and crossing the park where the mosque glitters in the evening sun. She pedals on into Ehrenfeld, passing the Turkish café, the landlocked lighthouse by the train tracks: home. As she parks her bike and unlocks the door of her building, she rubs her breast, feeling the lump Jules keeps nagging her to have checked.Later, she thinks, and closes the door behind her.

We Are Here

Santi is lost.

He stands in the middle of a busy shopping street, a stone in a river of staring people. He knows what a year of rough sleeping has done to him: the haunted eyes, the tremor, the nervous tension that makes people keep their distance. But he knows that’s not why they’re looking. Being the center of the world is exhausting. He wishes, sometimes, that they would just stop.Look at someone else, he wants to say, but the problem is that everyone else is perfectly transparent: even if they all lined up in front of him, it would be as useless as trying to hide in clear water.

He’s not sleeping rough these days. He has a place in the hostel now. That’s where he was trying to go. But the streets of this city lead back on themselves, knot and tangle into dead ends. He reaches into his jacket for the talisman of his grandfather’s knife. The key, he thinks, is to know who you are. Only then will you know where you’re going.

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