Page 44 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora shakes her head. “I don’t think anyone else does. Just you and me.”

Santi thinks of his constants. His mother. His father. Aurelia. Jaime. Héloïse: his wife, his girlfriend, his ex. He remembers the strange loneliness of being with her last time, the gnawing familiarity of every moment that was new to her. “Why only us?” he asks Thora. “What does it mean?”

Thora looks at him like she’s been waiting to have this conversation for decades. With a lurch of warping time, he realizes she has. “Okay, so here’s my theory,” she announces. “We’re dying.”

Santi frowns. “We’re dying?”

Thora nods vigorously. “We—I don’t know, had a car crash or fell off a bridge or something, and now we’re lying in hospital and our brains are just—going over and over different versions of our lives.” She mimes brain activity with her fingers.

Santi gently catches her hands and sets them down. “If it’s all in our heads, why is it in both our heads at the same time?”

Thora shrugs. “Maybe it’s only in one of our heads. Maybe you’re a figment of my imagination. Maybe I’m a figment of yours. Does it matter?” For the first time, Santi sees a lightness in her, a borderline hysteria he didn’t initially catch. He was so focused on her being the same Thora that the differences passed him by. What has it done to her, dealing with this alone for so long?

“Clearly it matters,” he says. “I don’t think I could imagine you. And I know I’m not imaginary.”

Thora rolls her eyes. “Of course I’d imagine you saying that.” To his unimpressed look, she says, “All right then, genius. What’s your theory?”

He doesn’t think he has one until she asks. But it seems so obvious, fresh from the renewed memory of his most recent death, that it comes to him at once. “Maybe we’re already dead.”

Thora makes a face. “And heaven is a provincial German city?”

“Not heaven.”

“Hell?”

He shakes his head. He can’t yet form it into words: the way he has felt in so many of his lives, the drive to fulfill a purpose he doesn’t yet understand. “We come back,” he says. “The same, but different. Each time with new challenges, new ways we can be better or worse.” He knocks the table, emphasizing his words. “Again and again, we’ve been given another chance.”

Thora’s eyes widen. For a moment, Santi thinks she is with him. He feels a bone-deep relief, a loneliness he has never understood finally easing. They are in this together. “You’re right,” she says. “We always get another chance. Infinite chances, to take every single path.”

Santi feels a lurch in his stomach, the beginning of an endless fall. “No. That’s not what I’m saying.” He leans forward. “I’m saying there’s one right path, and we have to find it.”

Thora’s nose wrinkles. “Right according to who? And why?”

“That’s what we have to find out.” He nods, filling in her agreement for her. “Maybe that’s part of the test. To find out what all this means.”

“What it means?” Thora laughs. “Itmeanswe’re fucking immortal. It means we never have to get stuck with a wrong choice again.”

After so many lives, he still forgets how alien her mind is to his own. “I don’t think that’s—” he starts, but she cuts him off, her face alight with revelation.

“I didn’t understand until you put it that way. But do you realize, this is what I’ve wanted my entire life? My entirelives. A way to go back. To see how it would be if I did things differently.” Sheshakes her head in wonder. “I’ve always been so scared of choosing wrong. Now, I don’t have just one choice. I can live every life I want to. Explore every version of who I can be.”

He speaks carefully. “You can’t control everything that happens to you.”

“Maybe not. But I remember all the ways things go wrong. Now I can learn from that. Make them go right.” She leans across the table, her eyes fever-bright. “I’ve already started. Even before I remembered. My mum and dad—you remember, my relationship with them used to be terrible. But I know how to deal with them now. I’ve learned, over lifetimes and lifetimes.” She laughs. “If I can learn that, I can learn anything.”

Santi can’t articulate the horror he’s feeling, endless as their existence, stretching back and back to a beginning he can’t remember. Thora touches his hand. “Hey. What’s wrong? You can do the same. Figure out your perfect life—your perfect lives—and make them happen.”

He shakes his head mechanically. “You can’t have more than one perfect life.”

Thora snorts. “Speak for yourself. I’ve always wanted to do everything. Be everything. Why should I have to settle for one version? Why can’t I live them all?”

“I can’t live like that. In—in pieces.” He takes his head in his hands, as if that will contain the selves that are spilling out, leaving nothing behind. “It all needs to make sense together. The stars, the clock—we have to explain it...” He looks up, pleading with her. “There has to be a cause. There has to be a meaning, somewhere at the heart of all this.”

Thora looks at him, level and serious. Then her focus shifts, caught by something she’s seen over his shoulder. Her breath catches. “Jules.”

Santi follows her gaze to the girl hurrying across the square. He remembers her crying on the other side of a rain-spattered window, Thora’s arms around her in photograph after photograph, as if she could hold on to her through every life.

“Each time we’ve been together, I’ve fucked it up somehow.” Thora gets to her feet. “But now I remember. I won’t make the same mistakes again. I can finally make it work.”

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