Page 45 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Thora—”

She runs, chasing after Jules, after the first of her perfect lives.

Santi watches her go, her empty wine glass left on the table, his untouched lager sparkling in the low autumn sun. In all his lifetimes, he has never felt so alone.

Part III

The Vanishing Now

Thora dozes in Jules’s arms, the light of a summer afternoon filtering through the dusty windows of the Ehrenfeld flat. In the next room, the baby sleeps, leaving them in this precious oasis of quiet.

Thora stills her rushing mind, fixes herself in how this feels: to have this life and to know how good it is. To be happy and know she is happy. Maybe it’s only possible because she remembers all the other ways it has been: Jules yelling at her from the doorway, Jules crying drunk at a table outside Der Zentaur, Jules calling her selfish, incapable of being happy where she is. And now, she is here: her head pillowed on Jules’s breast, Jules’s hand tangled in her hair. She wants to freeze herself in this moment. She already has eternity: can’t she have an eternity of this?

She knows the answer. One day, this life will be over, and she will move on to the next. She could make it happen again, she muses. Sweep Jules off her feet with words honed over lifetimes. Thora has become an expert in her, a connoisseur of her moods, a cultivator of her joys.

As Jules murmurs and shifts in her sleep, Thora feels a flicker of doubt. This isn’t the first time she’s tried. Sometimes she can’tfind Jules, no matter how long she searches. Sometimes Thora is the wrong version of herself, too impatient or angry or cynical to make it work. Some lives, she barely stays upright under the weight of all the things she can’t control. She tilts her head to look up at her wife’s sleeping face. Even if she tries to do everything the same, nothing will ever be quite like this again.

The buzzer rings, stark as an alarm.

“I’ll get it.” Thora kisses Jules on the forehead, slides out of her embrace to pad to the intercom. “Who is it?” She never would have checked before. Now, with a brand-new human in their care, every action ricochets out to shape Oskar’s whole future.

“I’m here to steal your baby.” Santi’s voice: the ultimate proof of the end and beginning that wait for her when this life is over.

Thora breathes in, readjusts her perspective. What matters is who he is in this life: her friend, come to meet her child for the first time. “Come on up,” she says cheerfully, and presses the key to let him in.

He arrives at the door with a bag of shopping.

“Hey, Wolfie.” She accepts the bag one-handed, embracing him with the other as he leans in to kiss her cheek. “You’re an angel,” she says, going through the bag: ready meals, snacks, a cornucopia of hands-free food.

“My mother is the angel. She’s the one who told me what you would actually need right now. Thanks to her, you don’t have ingredients for a risotto.”

“Thank fuck for Maria.” She takes his hand. “Come on. His Majesty is receiving visitors.”

They go softly through to the old spare room she still has trouble thinking of as a nursery. Jules, yawning, sits by the cot, one of her fingers grasped in Oskar’s tiny fist.

“Look at his beautiful brown eyes,” Jules whispers to Santi as he comes in.

Thora elbows him. “We know whose fault those are.”

Santi shrugs. “I told you, you should have gone the anonymous donor route. Asked for the best Viking DNA they had on file.”

“You’re perfect, you know that,” says Jules, and kisses him on the cheek as she stands up. “Anyone for tea?”

They both nod without looking away from the baby. “He looks like Estela,” Santi muses.

“Shh.” Thora looks to the door, but Jules is still in the kitchen.

“It’s true.” He’s doing what he always does: pushing her to admit this is not her only life. It’s a game they play, an old argument flipped upside down through the prism of their knowledge.

Thora reaches into the cot, lets Oskar grab her finger. “Estela’s nose never looked like that,” she argues quietly. There’s a reason Santi usually wins their game: the riddle of their lives is a mystery she can’t resist coming back to.

Santi laughs under his breath. “You just don’t want to think about the last time we did this.”

“There was a last time?” says Jules, coming back in with tea. “You never told me about that.”

Thora shoots Santi a warning look. He smiles, taking the mug from Jules. “Of course we didn’t tell you. Our secret love child is our business.”

“Well, at least tell me when their birthday is,” says Jules, sitting down next to Thora. “I’d like to send a card.”

---