Page 51 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora touches Jules’s chin, lifts it so she looks at her. “This is all I want.” She says it with complete conviction. For this version of her at this moment, it’s true.

Jules gathers her into her arms, sighing. “You’re still with me?” she asks.

Thora kisses her deeply. “Always.”

They make love, for the first time since Oskar was born. Afterward,lying in Jules’s arms, Thora feels like crying, but she doesn’t. She never does. Life after life, there is just this burning in the back of her throat, this dryness in her eyes, like some crucial part of her is missing.

Jules winds Thora’s hair—bright orange up to the roots where she hasn’t had time to dye it—around her finger. “What’s wrong, love?”

Thora looks at her: the face she’s known for so many lives, the eyes that know only this version of her. Santi’s right: it’s not fair. How can Jules forgive her for all the ways she’s done her wrong, when for her, those lives never happened?

“There’s something I have to tell you,” Thora says.

Jules turns sideways on the pillow. “What is it?”

Thora closes her eyes. “I don’t remember the beginning,” she says. “I don’t know when it started, or if there even was a start. But here is how it’s been, for me.”

She tells Jules everything. It’s a strange relief to share this with someone who isn’t Santi. She can tell it like a story, without being interrupted, without his perspective intruding on her own. Through it all, she keeps her eyes closed, not daring to look at Jules’s face.

When she’s finished, she waits for Jules to speak. Instead, she hears her shift in the bed. When she opens her eyes, Jules is sitting up, facing away from her.

“Jules.” The first stab of panic. “Talk to me.”

Jules doesn’t move. Thora sits up, takes her shoulders to turn her around. Jules stares at her. She’s not angry. It’s worse than that: her face is blank, confused. Gently, she detaches Thora’s hands. “I don’t know what to say.” She stands, starts getting dressed.

Thora’s heart freezes. She remembers another night, pushing her way through the New Year’s crowd. Santi told her about him and Héloïse.I tried to explain how I was feeling. She told me she didn’t know what to say. Right after that, she left.

“Jules.” Thora follows her wife out of the bedroom, into the nursery. Jules bundles Oskar into his carrier. “You’re not—” Thora tries to say. “You can’t—”

Jules looks at her, heartbroken. “I can’t leave him with you. You’re not yourself.”

Thora can’t help it. She starts laughing, painful gasps that rack her like labor pains. “Who am I, then?” She follows Jules into the bathroom, back to the hallway, to the door of the flat. “Please. Jules. Tell me who I am.”

Jules shakes her head and closes the door behind her.

Thora gasps. She’s drowning again, icy water dragging her under. She swears, gets dressed, and runs down the stairs, fumbling for her phone to call Santi.

He answers immediately. She’s not sure he sleeps anymore. “Jules,” she says, as she makes it down the last flight. “She’s leaving. It’s your fault. You have to come and fix this. You have to—”

“Thora, slow down.” She hates how calm he sounds. “Where are you?”

“At the flat. You have to, she’s—” Thora hangs up when she sees Jules already in the car, Oskar buckled into his seat in the back. The engine starts. Thora stops, frozen. Then she makes a choice. She runs for her bike. It’s absurd; she’ll never catch up. But the other choice, to stand and watch the best life she has known recede into the distance like it never was, is no choice at all.

Five minutes later, lying in the gutter, Thora shakes with pain and rage.

“You told me to do this,” she says, wheezing with agonized laughter. “You told me if I wanted to be with Jules, I had to tell her the truth. And then she left. You knew she’d leave, like Héloïse did. You knew I’d chase her. You probably knew a fucking truck would fucking run me over. You know it all, don’t you?”

Santi is there, of course, beyond the twisted wreck of her bicycle, beyond the paramedics who buzz like orange flies at the edge of her narrowing vision. “Hold on,” he says.

“You were wrong,” she gasps at him. “This isn’tright. I’m notmeantto die now. I’m meant to live, and love Jules, and raise Oskar, and drink tea and waste time and—oh, God, thishurts. Where’s Jules?”

“She’s coming, Thora, she’s got Oskar, just hold on.”

“Hold on,” she echoes. “That’s what I was trying to do.” The world is ebbing, flickering in and out like a guttering candle. “I don’t even get to say goodbye to them. How unfair is that?”

His voice shakes. “You’ll see them next time.”

“No, I won’t. She won’t be the same Jules—I won’t be the same Thora—Oskar won’t even exist—” It hurts to breathe, but she doesn’t want to let him have the last word. “You’d think I’d be used to dying by now. But it never stops being terrifying.”

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