Page 5 of Meet Me in Another Life

Their two names sit stark on the wall: no ampersand, no heart, nothing but shared space holding them together. That’s right, Thora decides. “I’m glad I left the party,” she tells him.

“Of course,” Santi says. “I mean, this was fate, right?”

Thora blinks. “’Scuse me?”

“Fate. Us meeting each other. Climbing the tower.”

She laughs. “Really? You’re a determinist? Free will is an illusion, the universe is a ball rolling down a hill, et cetera?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not talking about determinism. I’m talking about fate.”

“What’s the difference?”

He sits down again on the edge of the platform. “Determinism means everything’s meaningless but we can’t change it. Fate means there’s a plan that God is working through us.”

“Right,” Thora says slowly. “So the only reason we climbed this tower was because God wanted us to?”

Santi stays irritatingly serene. “That’s not how it works. He didn’t make us do it directly. He made us the kind of people who would choose to climb a ruined tower just to see the stars.”

Thora pushes her hair back. “Where to even start. What made me the kind of person I am?” She frowns at the echo of her thought as she left the club. “Maybe there’s something genetic there. God knows my parents are weird. But it also has a lot to do with my childhood, with the things I’ve experienced in my life.” The buzz of the argument makes her feel drunk, even though she only had one glass of wine and that was an hour ago. “Think about it. What if your parents had moved to Cologne before you were born? If you’d grown up here? What if mine had stayed in the Netherlands where they met? What if—I don’t know, something tragic had happened when we were children? We’d be completely different people.”

Santi shakes his head. “I don’t accept that. We are who we are. We would be the same people whatever happened to us.”

“Okay. Let’s do a thought experiment. Tonight, did you make a series of decisions that led to you lying on the grass and staring at the stars?”

He hesitates. “It felt like I did,” he concedes. “But I made those decisions because of the person I am.”

“And you weren’t even close to deciding something else?”She’s animated now, turned toward him, the city and the stars forgotten. “I can tell you I was. I nearly went down to the river. I nearly went back into the club, God help me. And if I had done either of those things, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

He grins. “So you think this conversation will radically change who we are?”

“Stop twisting my argument!” She’s angry at him, his security in who he is, when she feels like a bundle of contradictory ideas clumsily woven into a person. “No, maybe not this conversation. But if we—see each other again, become part of each other’s lives—”

His grin intensifies. “You want to become part of my life? Thora, I don’t evenknowyou!”

She hits him on the shoulder. “Friendschange each other’s lives all the time.” She rolls up her sleeve to reveal the tattoo she got two days ago in the Belgian Quarter, the skin of her wrist still reddened around a cluster of faint stars. “Take this. My friend Lily said we should get tattoos to commemorate starting uni. So if I hadn’t met Lily ten years ago, I would literally be physically different right now.”

Santi takes her arm, turns it to the light. “What is it?”

“It’s a constellation. Vulpecula. The fox. That’s what my surname means.” She picks at the edges where it’s starting to scab. “I guess—it sounds stupid, but I got it to remind me who I am. That I belong up there.”

Santi flicks a leaf off the edge, watches it make its erratic way down. “Why would you need a tattoo to remember that?”

He probably doesn’t mean it as an insult. But Thora feels it as one, like he’s seen through her affectations to the incoherence at her core.

The cathedral bells toll. It’s two in the morning. Thora feels awaver of decision, the only evidence she has that Santi is wrong: she did have the choice to climb up here, and she has the choice now to climb back down. “I should go,” she says.

Santi grins at her. “I knew you were going to say that.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Fine. Just to prove you and God wrong, I’ll stay.”

“Okay. Enjoy yourself. I’m going,” he says, and disappears through the hole in the floor.

Thora meant to stay, to steal some time alone with the stars. But sooner than she expected, she starts to feel lonely. As she lowers herself onto the stairs, she makes the mistake of looking down. The tower drops into darkness, shot with shards of light like Santi’s childish idea of heaven. Except what’s beyond is solid ground, and Thora doesn’t believe she’s going anywhere else if she falls to her death tonight. Her palms sweat. Wedging her foot into a dent in the brickwork, she feels for the next foothold as her hands start to slip. Lunging wildly, she grabs for a protruding brick and pulls herself into the wall.

She hangs, staring through a gap in the bricks. She knows what she should see: the starry sky above the city. Instead, she sees herself, endlessly refracted. An infinity of Thoras stare back at her with fear in their eyes.

She almost loses her grip. Squeezing her eyes shut, she swings herself to the safety of the steps and collapses.

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