Page 64 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Thora, what are you doing?” he asks.

She blinks up at him. “What do you mean?”

“You said you’ve been here five years. Has this been your life? Stealing impossible food and—and throwing things into the void?”

Thora stares at him in disbelief. “I thought you loved miracles.”

Santi rubs his face, exhaling. “I don’t think we’re supposed to exist this way.”

“Come on. What’s the alternative? Getting a job?” She scoffs. “Besides, it’s not like I’m stealingfromanyone. Unless the ether has property rights.”

Santi shakes his head. “It’s not right. It feels like—like cheating.”

“Maybe if this were a game we had agreed to play. But I don’t recall signing up.” She drops her last pine cone and stands, confronting him. “Last time, I told you we had no meaningful choices at all. But I realized—that’s not true. We have one. To refuse to play by the rules.”

Something is building in Santi, a rage made from lifetimes of trailing in Thora’s wake, picking up the damage she leaves behind. “This isn’t a game,” he says. “Not to me.” He points past her at the tower, shaking with regret. “I ended my own life. I left Aurelia to live with knowing what I had done. Can you imagine how that hurt her?” He presses his fingers to his temples. “How could I do that? How could you let me?”

Thora crosses her arms. “It was your decision.”

“How could I make my own decisions when you had made me who I was?” He doesn’t know how to explain it to her: how meeting her so young made her the center of his world, something between a second mother and a saint.

Thora rolls her eyes. “You were the one who said you’d be yourself no matter what happened to you!”

“I was wrong.”

The admission silences her. Under different circumstances, that would make him laugh. Finally, he has found a way to stop their endless argument.

Thora shakes herself. “Santi, it doesn’t matter what you did.Because you didn’t actually do it. None of this is real.” She gestures at the invisible outline of the annihilation portal. “What more proof do you need?”

“I’m real.” He steps toward her. “You’re real.”

She shakes her head, a strange smile on her face. “Real people don’t die and come back. Real people don’t regenerate into a hundred versions of themselves until all that’s left of them is anger and fear.” She paces away from him. “Maybe we were real once, a long time ago.”

Santi watches the hard line of her shoulders. She has retreated into the holes in the world, leaving him alone again. But he can’t do this alone. His actions mean nothing without her: if they are both being punished, then they both need to atone.

“I’ll prove it to you,” he says. “I’ll show you something you can’t dismiss as unreal.”

Thora turns her head. A smile creeps up her cheek: she can never resist a challenge. “Go on then.”

“I need some time. Meet me at Der Zentaur, a week from now.”

Thora crosses the courtyard back to him. She scans his face curiously, but he gives nothing away.

“Fine,” she says. Her eyes flick up to the tower. “I won’t ask what time.”

He nods. “Let’s make it midday, not midnight.”

Thora smiles. She kisses his cheek and vaults the fence, loping away until she disappears behind the tower.

When he gets home, Héloïse is pruning her bonsai tree. She sits in the window in the last of the winter light, swearing softly in French as she wrangles the branches into a more pleasing arrangement. She doesn’t know it has been a lifetimes-long project.Like his drawing, Santi thinks; but without the chance to remember, to grow, Héloïse still never quite gets it right.

For a moment, he just watches her, this woman he knows so asymmetrically: each version of their relationship new to her, while he sees only the echoes of what came before. There is truth here, he realizes, in the place where all their histories intersect.

“You’re late,” she says without looking up.

Santi stoops to stroke Félicette as she rubs against his ankles. “I ran into an old friend.”

Héloïse abandons the tree with a dismissive gesture and comes over to kiss him. Her brown eyes scan him as she pulls back. “Hmm. Evasive.” A smile plays around her mouth. “Is this your way of telling me you’re running off with a hot German?”

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