Page 47 of Meet Me in Another Life

“I was in it.”

He looks up, his attention caught. “You drowned?”

“Yes. That’s one death I’m not keen to try again.” She can’t deny that it’s a relief to talk about this. She watches Santi finish the cigarette and pull his memory book from his tattered coat. “Jules was asking what you’re always writing in there. You’d better not ever let her see it.” He ignores her. He’s busy writing what she just told him into a square in a neat grid. “Your handwriting’s different,” Thora says, tracing the italics that lean forward as if they can’t get their message out fast enough. “Guess it’s not surprising. Your personality’s different.”

“Graphology is a pseudoscience,” he mutters.

Thora smiles. “So you’re still committed to the idea of being one Santi? Constant through eternity?”

He doesn’t reply. She holds her free hand out for the book. Surprised, he slides it across to her. She pages through endlessly repeating versions of the two of them: police partners, fireworks bursting in haloes above their heads; teenagers chasing their wavering shadows down the beach. He’s getting better. She remembers when his drawings were tentative, unsure. Now, they are almost masterful. She supposes he’s had plenty of time to practice.

“I keep thinking if I just draw them all out, I can find the pattern,” Santi says. “Find out which one was real.”

“Which one was real?” She stares at him. “Santi, they’re all real or none of them are real. Don’t go raking through broken glass looking for diamonds.”

He holds her gaze, eyes tired. “I don’t understand. You’re really content not to ask why?”

Thora bites her lip. She wants to tell him about the nights she wakes and hallucinates the stars, racing across the ceiling of her and Jules’s bedroom in all the constellations she remembers. But Oskar is warm in her arms, and Jules is sleeping meters away, hers at last. “If I ask why,” she whispers, “I’ll lose this.”

Santi shakes his head. “I think it’s more than that. I think you’re afraid.”

Thora snorts. “Oh, really? What am I afraid of?”

“That I’m right. That this is a test. That it requires something from us, something we may not want to give.”

“I thinkyou’reafraid,” Thora shoots back. “You can’t face the possibility that this doesn’t mean anything. That it’s just some kind of cosmic mistake.” She lowers her voice, shifts Oskar’s weight in her arms. “You’ve been trying to pass this test, walk the right path, for lifetimes already. Where has it gotten you?”

They glare at each other until Félicette jumps up between them. Santi pets her absently. “You think she remembers?”

Thora strokes the cat’s soft black fur. “Maybe Félicette’s the key to it all.”

When he leaves, Thora presses a spare key into his hand. “No buzzer next time.”

He kisses her cheek and disappears.

Two months later, Thora is emailing pictures of Oskar to her parents when she hears a key in the door. “You’re back early,” she calls, expecting Jules.

“What about when you were my PhD supervisor?”

“Nice to see you too,” Thora remarks as Santi comes into the living room. “I assume it’s the death question again?”

He nods and sits down on the sofa, opening his memory book.

Thora casts her mind back to the brittle loneliness of that life. “In my bed, of old age. Or so I assume. Of course, there’s a chance an assassin broke in and murdered me in my sleep.” She watches Santi scribble in his book. “What about you?”

“Stroke,” he says without pausing. “I was only thirty-five.”

“You really have all the luck, don’t you?” She drops down next to him. “What are you planning to do with all this?”

“I’m close to something.” He scratches his stubble, looks up at her, wild-eyed. “What if, each time we die, it’s because we’re meant to?”

It takes her a moment to understand. She chokes. “I’m sorry. Are we back to the fate thing again? I thought our whole situation made the concept of fate redundant.”

“I told you. You have to stop thinking of each life as self-contained. It’s the big picture. It’s the whole.” He sweeps his hands wide, as if words aren’t enough to get his point across. “When we were partners, chasing the man with the knife. You remembered I died climbing the tower, and you stopped me to try and save me. But I died anyway.” He hits the arm of the sofa to emphasize his words. “Because I was meant to.”

“I don’t...” Thora closes her eyes in frustration. “How would you even disprove a theory like that?”

He looks at her blankly, as if that’s the wrong question. For a flashing moment, Thora sees him as Jules sees him: worryingly thin, dressed in old, dirty clothes, dark circles under his eyes. She sighs. “Santi, look at yourself. You’re barely functioning. You’re sleeping less than me and I have a three-month-old baby.” She puts a hand on his arm. “You need to take care of yourself.”

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