Page 40 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora bats his hand away. “May I remind you we shouldn’t be aiming to kill anyone?”

López smiles. “You know I’d never use it. It’s symbolic.”

“Everything’s symbolic with you,” Thora grumbles, as a queue for glühwein bars their path. They cut through into a knot of swayingpeople, lost in laughter until Thora yells “Polizei!” and they scatter, giggles turning to drunken screams. Thora grimaces. “Why did this guy have to pick New Year’s Eve of all days?”

“Why, did you have something better to do?” López asks.

“Of course not. Making the city safer is my life.” She gives him a sideways look. “If I was joining the party, I’d have picked better company.” She’s not worried that he’ll take it to heart. She never has to watch what she says with López; she speaks to him almost as she would speak to herself.

True to form, he smiles. “You don’t think we’d be friends if we weren’t colleagues?”

“You mean if I wasn’t your boss?” She catches his wry look. “Why, do you?”

He avoids the question. “You’re the one who loves speculating about parallel universes. I’m content with the one we have.”

Not speculating.Fragments of other lives, other selves, so vivid they sometimes overtake Thora’s current existence entirely. “You don’t think any universe could be better than this one?”

López scratches his stubble. “How about the one where we catch this guy before he hurts anyone else?”

“Sounds good to me.” Thora leads them farther into the square. “So, what were your New Year plans?” She keeps scanning the crowd as she talks, her attention more on the job than on what she’s saying. “I guess if you weren’t on duty you’d be doing something devastatingly romantic for Héloïse.”

“Héloïse and I broke up.”

Thora snaps back to him, surprised. “That’s a shame. She was lovely. Too lovely for you, obviously.” She’s trying to provoke him, but he doesn’t bite. “Seriously. Why didn’t it work out?”

López climbs up on the rung of a barstool to get a better view. “Because I knew her too well.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean—it felt—unfair,” he says hesitantly, as if he’s having trouble articulating what he means. “Like I was always a step ahead of her.”

Thora follows him through the hot breeze from a roast chestnut stall. “Honestly, that sounds ideal. You could make her fall deeply in love with you by anticipating her every need.”

López looks back at her. “Wouldn’t that violate her agency?”

Thora doesn’t miss the ironic echo of her lectures on the subject of women’s autonomy. Typical López, turning her own arguments against her. “It’s not violating her agency if it’s what she wants.”

He laughs. “I would love to hear you explain that to Héloïse.”

“So what happened?” Thora asks. “You brought her a cup of tea unprompted and she flipped out?”

“No. I tried to explain how I was feeling, and...” He shrugs. “She told me she didn’t know what to say. Right after that, she left.”

Thora stops, tracking a man’s progress through the crowd, but it’s a false alarm: he turns and he’s someone else, too young, smiling. She looks back to López. It’s tempting to mock him again, but instead she chooses a brief moment of sincerity. “I’m sorry.”

He gives her a tired smile. “Still lasted longer than I expected. It surprises me that anyone puts up with us for long.”

Thora snorts. “Speak for yourself. I’m a fucking catch, and one day, some lucky person is going to realize it.”

“That’s not what I mean.” They’re approaching the edge of the square, moving more freely as the crowd thins out. “We both know we’re not ordinary people.”

Thora smiles wryly. “What could you possibly mean by that?”

“We know things we shouldn’t.” López keeps pace with her. “About other people. About each other.”

Thora makes a face. “I don’t think weknowanything. I think we’re both just wired to see possibilities. Other ways things could have been, if the world was different. If we’d made different choices.”

López shakes his head. “I don’t think they’re glimpses of what might have been. I think they’re clues, pointing us to a larger truth.”

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