Page 52 of Meet Me in Another Life

He takes her hand, squeezes it hard. He’s crying, of course. He’ll always cry for her, and she’ll never cry for him. “I’ll look after them,” he says.

She laughs, even though it hurts more than she could have believed. “Fuck you,” she says, with all the sincerity she can muster. She understands now, the revelation coming to her in wavesof pain: the choices she has made because of him, the ways her life has warped around him. “It’s you,” she spits. “You’re the problem. You’re what gets in the way.”

“Thora,” he says, hurt spilling out of him. “We’ll talk about this. I’ll find you, next time.”

The sirens wail like wild birds. Thora narrows herself to a point, pushes her lips to form the last thing she will say to him. “I never want to see you again.”

Never Means Never

Santi sees his reflection in the glass, hooded and wary, before he smashes it. Pulling his sleeve over his hand, he reaches through the jagged hole and opens the window, brushing the shards off the sill so he can climb through. He drops and crouches, waiting for the echo of broken glass to give way to silence. When he’s sure he’s alone, he straightens up in the nighttime hush of the university’s alumni relations office. Somewhere in this dusty room, crammed with old computers and filing cabinets, he will find Thora.

He’s been hunting her since he arrived in Cologne six months ago. Not by train, this time: in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car, in the middle of a long, straggling hitchhike across Europe, fleeing the mess he’d left behind him in Spain. He never meant it to be the end, just another stop on his journey. But when he saw the skyline of the city, he wept without knowing why.

His driver looked across in perplexed sympathy. “You been traveling a long time, man?”

“I guess.” But as the city coalesced around him, Santi couldn’t shake the feeling that he had never really been anywhere else.

His driver dropped him at the Hauptbahnhof. He walked outinto the cathedral square, memories coming to him in snatches, a melody heard through broken headphones. Sitting on these steps, sketching the twin spires into his notebook. Hurrying out of the station on a frosty morning, gulping the last of his coffee as he headed for the police headquarters. He still didn’t understand until a man in a blue coat came up to him and touched his arm. “You’re here.”

Santi stared at him, his haunted face, his long hair knotting in the breeze. He couldn’t shake the idea that the man was transparent: that if he looked hard enough, he could see through him to what he stood for.

“You’re here,” the man said again.

Santi looked up at the cathedral. “I am here,” he echoed. The words slid through his mind, solidified into an image, stark capitals on a wall. The letters shifted. Not I.We.

Thora, the last time he saw her. Gasping with pain, her hand tight on his, clinging to the life she was desperate not to leave.

The man in the blue coat was walking away. “Wait,” Santi called after him. “Where’s Thora?”

The man looked at Santi as if the question didn’t make sense. “Here,” he said.

Santi worked it out as he ran through the old town, stumbling over lives and deaths to find the one that mattered. Last time, he outlived Thora by forty-five years. He was thirty-five now, so she must be eighty.God, let her still be alive.He quickened his pace, the last words she had said to him burned into his mind.I never want to see you again.

He didn’t seriously think she had meant it until he arrived at Der Zentaur and she wasn’t there. He stood scanning and rescanning every table, looking for an old woman with Thora’s eyes.

“Can I help you?”

Brigitta, familiar as a ghost. Santi reached for her in relief. She backed away, holding up her hands.

“Sorry,” he said, clenching his fists. “I’m looking for someone. She—she’s a regular here. An older woman, tall, English accent. Her hair—she might have dyed it.”

Brigitta shook her head. “I don’t recognize that description.”

When Santi left the bar and looked across the square, he laughed. Written on the clock tower in bold black letters was Thora’s message: NEVER MEANS NEVER.

It should have convinced him she meant it. But a message telling him to stay away was still a message: words she chose to write, knowing he would read them. He couldn’t help taking it as a challenge.

A challenge that led him to this dark office, papers blowing across the floor in the breeze through the broken window. Something moves in the corridor. Santi presses himself against the wall, heart thundering. He remembers, in other lives, being calm, confident, a person with solid edges. Now, he is unraveling like a piece of his mother’s crochet, loose threads catching on every sound. He takes in shallow breaths, trying to get himself under control: not his own, but the control of something he is not sure anymore whether to call God.

He tried to do this the right way first. After half a year fruitlessly haunting the Odysseum, the arts cinema, the LGBT center, the Turkish café in Ehrenfeld, the tattoo shops in the Belgian Quarter—every place that spoke to him of Thora, everywhere she could have left some trace—he went in desperation to the university.

“I’m trying to get in touch with someone,” he said. “She might have gone here sixty years ago.”

The receptionist looked at him over his glasses. “Do you have a name?”

“Thora Lišková.” Saying her name aloud was like uttering a prayer. As he spelled it out, he remembered her hand carving the letters one by one into the tower, so many lives ago.

The receptionist frowned. “Sorry, nothing’s coming up.”

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