Page 54 of Meet Me in Another Life

He sits down in the chair by her bedside. “Looks like you’re the one who’s about to be late.”

He’s relieved he can still make her smile. He runs a hand through his hair, and the way she watches him do it, with half-annoyed recognition, breaks his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I would have come sooner. But you did a good job hiding. I was starting to think you were right about being a figment of my imagination.”

She snorts, unimpressed. “Really. You think you could imagine me?”

“You’re right.” He meets her eyes—Thora’s same blue eyes, looking at him out of the ruin of an old woman’s face. “I couldn’t have imagined you thinking Andromeda was a reasonable name for a child.”

Thora grits her teeth. “I’d hit you if I had the strength to lift my arm.”

He laughs. As she shifts her hand on the covers, he sees that the place where the tattoo should be is blank. He’s too ashamed to roll up his sleeve and show her the copy done from memory on his own wrist, at the last tattoo shop he searched in the Belgian Quarter.

“How long have you been in Cologne?” he asks.

“Sixty-two years.”

Santi quakes with wasted time. For thirty-five of those years, he’s been alive. For fifteen, he’s been a free adult. He could have come here, found her before it was too late. “I only remembered when I got here. Again. Was it the same for you?”

She nods, eyes closed.

He leans forward. “What is it about this place? Why do we always end up here? Why do we never remember until we arrive?”

“Maybe if we left, we would forget.” She coughs, the deep, terrifying cough of the terminally ill. “You should try it,” she says when she catches her breath. “Too late for me.”

The last thing Santi wants to do is forget. And he doesn’t want to let her forget, either. “I looked after them,” he says. “Jules and Oskar, after you died. Like I promised.”

Thora’s clouded gaze doesn’t waver. “Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“Yes.” He is shaking with rage; for a blessed moment, he is not the scattered Santi of this life, but the driven one of last time. “I had a mission. I was trying to find the right path. But I gave it up, to be there for them. Because of what they meant to you.”

“You always have to be such a martyr.” She fumbles with the blanket, veined hands shaking. “I would have been there to look after them myself, if it wasn’t for you.”

Old guilt weighs him down. She was happy with Jules; he shouldn’t have interfered. But he was so consumed with the greater truth that he couldn’t fathom why she would want to hide from it.The way you live isselfish, Santi.Her words, coming back to him in his own voice. A thought strikes him, startling as sunlight. What if they are not being tested, but punished? What if the way he is now is a judgment on his failure last time?

He closes his eyes, rubbing his aching neck. He’s so tired. Lord knows when this will end, when he will have seen enough, done enough, been enough.

“Speaking of which,” Thora says, “I think you’ve kept me from my family long enough.”

He follows her gaze through the glass, where her loved ones watch with understandable suspicion. A man half her age they’ve never seen before, showing up at her deathbed. He gives them a wave. They look back at him, stony-faced. He stands. “I’ll leave you to say your goodbyes.”

“You should. I don’t know if I’ll see them again. You, on the other hand, I can’t escape.”

She says it like a joke, but by now he knows Thora well enough to hear real anger there too. He wants to ask her why she hid from him, why she left him alone. But her rage is a wall between them, hard and smooth as glass.

He takes her hand gently, the papery skin sliding over the fragile bones. Thora, mountain-tall in his imagination, reduced to this. She leans back against the pillow, closing her eyes. “Till next time,” she says.

At the door, he turns for one last look, angry and heartbroken in equal measure. She doesn’t open her eyes. He leaves, hurrying past her family before they can ask any questions.

She dies the following week. Andromeda lets him know with a text message and a grudging invitation to the funeral. He doesn’t go. The memory of seeing her put in the ground, Jules weeping at his side, is too fresh. Instead, he goes to the address he found in her file. From across the road, he stares disbelieving at a big, boxy house framed by climbing roses. It bears no relation to any of the Thoras he has known: as if she knew the only way to hide from him was to distance herself entirely from what she was. His own words on the tower come back to him, as if young, blue-haired Thora whispers them mockingly in his ear.We’d be the same people whatever happened to us. She has turned her entire life into a point in their never-ending argument.

Someone is watching. A neighbor at the window, phone in her hand. Santi sees himself from her perspective: a young man in a hoodie and dirty jeans, staring intently at a dead woman’s empty house. He shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps walking.

That night, he comes back and breaks in. As he climbs through the back window into what looks like a library, he thanks his criminal childhood for teaching him the skills he needs. The sense of a pattern, a plan, gives him serenity as he pulls the window closed. He moves away before clicking on his flashlight.

The house is big. More unnerving, it’s immaculate, everything in its place. He wonders again what happened to Thora this time, what turned her into the kind of person who collects horseshoes—fifty of them, nailed in regimental order above the range cooker—and, apparently, plays the piano. He imagines his fiery, impatient Thora sitting down to practice her scales and has to stifle laughter.

He pans his flashlight up the stairs, illuminating photographs:a life flayed and hung on the wall. In most of the pictures, Thora is alone. In some, she stands next to a tall man with broad shoulders who Santi assumes is her husband. It’s odd seeing her with a man rather than a woman, until he remembers that he once stood in that place. It seems so strange to his current self, so outside anything that he would want or need from her. It feels more like a dream: the kind you wake from with a wry smile, shrugging at the tricks of the subconscious.

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