Page 50 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Not exactly. She’s a year younger than me.” Thora smiles. “She always says it must be some kind of admin error, because she’s clearly the mature one.”

Santi pauses before he speaks. “What I was trying to say earlier. I didn’t mean—” He starts again. “It’s not for me to tell you how to live.”

Thora snorts. “You could have fooled me.”

“But one thing I think is true. Your relationship with Jules is built on knowledge that you have and she doesn’t. That’s not fair. And I think you know it.”

Thora looks away. There’s an emptiness opening up inside her, a loneliness she can’t bear. “I just want to be with her,” she says miserably.

“Then be with her,” Santi says. “But you have to be honest. With her, as well as with yourself.”

He stands. Thora looks at his offered hand as if it’s a choice. But it isn’t, not really. She has been living her life with Jules inside a glass box. Now, she has to break them out of it, see if they can make something of the shards.

“I do want to know why,” she says. “You think I’ve stopped asking, but that’s not what it is. Just—catch me again when I have less to lose.”

Santi gives her a serious look. “I will.”

She takes his hand and lets him pull her to her feet. “Maybe we’re both just crazy,” she remarks as they walk down the aisle under the dark stained glass. “Locked away in a little room somewhere, dreaming of other lives.”

They walk out into the summer night, through the old town back toward Ehrenfeld. Thora tilts her head up as they cross the park. The brilliance of the stars looks false, lights on a too-close ceiling. “I remember how scared I was,” she says to Santi. “The first time I realized they’d changed.”

He follows her gaze upward. “What scares me isn’t that they changed,” he says. “What scares me is that they stopped changing.”

“What?” Thora squints, trying to match the scattered lights to the myriad star maps in her memory. “Since when?”

“They’ve been the same for lifetimes now.”

She looks at him, trying to figure out if he’s playing a trick on her. But she knows the Santi of this life. He wouldn’t joke, not about this.

“I guess I stopped looking,” she says.

His silence is enough of an answer.

Thora sighs. “Tell me, then. What does it mean?”

Santi shrugs. “Everything.”

She snorts. “That’s such a typical thing for you to say. And having known a lot of you, I can speak with authority.” She blinks, and the stars disappear. Then they’re back, steady and waiting. “Why do you think we never made it up there?”

Santi looks from the stars to her with a fond smile. “There’s no never,” he says. “Not for us.”

Thora shudders at it: a horror and a comfort, that this isn’t their last chance. She laughs, a strange hilarity overtaking her.

“What?”

“You know what I need right now?” She looks at him, his haunted eyes that never really look back, always fixed on forever. “A friend. Like you’re supposed to be, in this life. Not—whatever the hell we are in the big picture. Can you just—be that for me? Just this once?”

His eyes linger for a moment on the sky. Then he offers her his arm. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll take you home.”

Jules is waiting for her when she gets back.

Thora stands by the door. Maybe this is when she fucks it up, when Jules walks out and never comes home. She could lean into it, like closing her eyes into a fall. Or she could fight to rise, stubborn against gravity all the way to the stars.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have stayed and talked to you.”

Jules doesn’t speak. Thora gets the unsettling feeling that her wife can see right through her, all the layers and versions, to the emptiness inside.

“Was Santi right?” Jules asks. “When he said you were pretending? Because—if you do feel trapped, if you want something else, I...” She shakes her head, dashing tears from her eyes.

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