Page 49 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora stares at him. She can’t say it.Because that’s who Jules needs me to be.She doesn’t know where it comes from, this conviction that seeking elsewhere and being with Jules are mutually incompatible: that she can only have one if she gives up the other.

“What’s happening?”

Thora turns, heart in her mouth. She doesn’t know how long Jules has been standing there, towel-wrapped and dripping.

“Fuck.” Thora panics. She heads for the door. “I have to go.”

“Where?” Jules reaches for her. “Can we talk about this?”

Thora shakes her off, pulling on her boots. “I’m reliably informed that there’s no point talking to me when I’m like this.”

Jules stands shivering, water beading on her shoulders. Her expression, pinched and wary, is too familiar. This is how she looks when it all goes wrong. “Thora, please—”

Thora hovers on the threshold. She had one plan for this life: Jules above everything. But she can’t stay here, teetering on the edge of the chasm Santi has ripped through their lives. She crashes down the steps, drowning in echoes: a hundred stairwells overlaying each other, and she’s running down them all at once. She bursts out onto the street where the lighthouse points like an accusing finger at the sky. It all looks wrong to her now: the city she has been trying so hard to see as real, disintegrating into fragments before her eyes.

“Thora!”

She looks over her shoulder to see Santi running after her. She ducks down a side street, emerges by the mosque on the edge of the park, its high glass windows mirroring back a hundred fractured selves. She keeps running as if she could leave them all behind.

Santi finds her in the church where they once got married. She knows it’s him as soon as the door creaks open. She doesn’t turn. She keeps staring ahead at the altar, at the hanging, expressionless Christ. In her peripheral vision, Santi pauses in the aisle to cross himself.

“I thought this was literally the last place you would look for me,” she says.

He slides into the pew next to her. “That’s why I came here first.”

Thora sighs. “Is Jules okay?”

He shakes his head.

Thora doesn’t have to ask more. She bites her nails, tastes the bitter coating she painted on them in an effort to break the habit. “I finally learned her. I finally know how I have to be, how to make her stay. I didn’t fuck it up this time. This one is on you.” She takes a drowning breath. “Did you tell her?”

“No,” he says softly.

Thora stares at the flickering candles. She narrows her eyes until the flames splinter, merging with the brightness at the corner of her eye. She remembers walking up this aisle in a blood-red dress, Santi waiting for her at the altar. The gap between that self and this one is wide enough for her to fall into and disappear.

“When you were my daughter,” Santi begins.

Thora braces herself for some sage advice. “Yes?”

“Do you remember how we died?”

“Of course I remember.” Thora hugs herself, the pew hard against her back. “We were in the car. It skidded on a patch of ice, and—” She shudders, feeling again the obscene, unimaginable pain. “You died first. I was alone in the car for half an hour.” The bitterness of that self floods back, possessing her like a vengeful ghost. “You promised you’d never leave me. But you did.”

He gives her a rueful look. “I came back.”

She scoffs. “As my annoying twin brother.”

“Older brother.”

She rolls her eyes. “By half an hour—”

They stare at each other. Wordless, she holds out her hand for his book. He turns to the right page and gives it to her. Her eyes flicker from point to point in the grid. “It fits,” she says. “Always. You die first, you’re older next time. I die first, I’m older. We dieat the same time, we come back the same age.” She meets Santi’s eyes, consumed by the thrill of discovery.

“I knew it,” Santi says. “I knew it meant something.”

Thora’s joy leaves her as quickly as it came. She slumps in the pew, handing the book back. “So what? We’re still going to die. Does it really matter if you’re older or I’m older next time?” She goes to bite her nails, shoves her hand under her leg to stop herself. “As long as I’m the same age as Jules, I don’t care.”

“I thought you always were.”

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