Page 69 of Meet Me in Another Life

It’s from Santi. She considers deleting it unread. Damning her curiosity, her constant need to know, she opens it.

I found him. We’re in the house.

It’s not an invitation. Thora doesn’t care. She slides down the ladder and runs.

When she comes up the stairs of the memory house, Peregrine is standing in the center of the room. Santi sits against the wall, head in his hands.

The man in the blue coat looks at Thora, quietly lost. She turns to Santi. “Where did you find him?”

“I called him here.” He points to Thora’s scribbled addition to his painting. “I said his name aloud, and he walked in.”

Trust Santi to try what amounted to a prayer: a leap of faith she would never have dreamt of making. “And?” she prompts.

Santi shakes his head. For the first time, she sees the despair in his eyes. “It’s no use. He’s not making any sense.”

She can’t bear it: she has never seen him so hopeless. She strides up to Peregrine. “Okay,” she says. “Tell me what’s happening.”

Peregrine frowns. “You’re here,” he says.

“We’d figured out that much, thanks.” Thora’s anger surges. “Where. Is. Here?”

“I—” His mouth falls open. “I can’t tell.”

“Yes, you can.” She feels her rage closing in on her, narrowing her to a single point of fury. Easier to accept her nature than to fight it. Easier to lash out, to break him like she’s trying to breakthe world. She paces away from him, grabs a broken spar of timber from the floor. “You can and you will.”

Santi stands up. “What are you doing?”

“Getting answers.” Thora advances on Peregrine. “He’s about to tell us what’s going on.”

“Thora,” Santi says in warning.

“He knows something.” She hears herself pleading, without knowing what she’s asking for. “He knows something and he’s hiding it from us.”

Santi comes to stand beside her. “Look at him,” he says. “He’s confused. He can’t—”

“He’sconfused?” Thora slams the spar against the floor. Santi jumps. Peregrine doesn’t move. She hates him for that, as she hates him for what he is, an empty cipher, promising answers and delivering nothing.

Santi turns to face her. Only someone who knows him as well as she does would see the tension in his shoulders. “This isn’t you,” he says.

“Are you sure?” She laughs. After all this time, how little he knows her. “We killed each other, Santi. I annihilated your wife and made you watch. We don’t know who we really are. And I don’t think we want to.” She gestures wildly at the walls, his beautiful visions of the lives he chooses to remember. “You say you’re trying to find the truth of us. But how do you know you’re not just finding what we wish was true? You can’t just—collect all the bits of yourself you like and say, that’s me, everything else is an aberration. We’ve both done terrible things. That’s part of us, and we have to own it.”

“We do,” he says, and she sees how deeply he means it, how the scar of her murder has sunk into him. “But it can’t be all we are.”

His words vibrate through her. She wants to believe him, desperately, but all she can feel is Héloïse’s fingers disappearing, her own hand driving the knife into Santi’s chest. “Who cares?” she says, her voice breaking. “If I’ve been a murderer, does it matter if I’ve been anything else?”

“Yes,” he says, fire in his voice. “Thora,yes. It’s not one choice. It’s a hundred choices, every single day, and all of them matter.” He holds her gaze steadily as he says, “I learned that from you.”

All the fight goes out of Thora. She hangs her head with a breathless laugh. She drops the spar. “I’m sorry,” she says to Peregrine. “You can go.”

Peregrine looks at Santi, as if he needs his permission. Santi nods. The man in the blue coat wanders away down the stairs. Thora exhales and sits down, feeling like she has won and lost at the same time. Santi comes to sit beside her. They watch, together, as their only real lead disappears from view. It hurts like it hurt when she was eleven years old and her parakeet flew away.

“Well done,” Santi says, like he’s congratulating her on passing a test.

Thora laughs under her breath. “I thought you decided we weren’t being tested,” she says. “After you stabbed me in the heart and it failed to magically get us out of here.”

Santi looks at her wryly. “You think I act the way I do because I’m being tested?” He shakes his head. “I act the way I do because it is the only choice I have left.”

Thora smiles at the echo of her own thought, coming back to her changed by Santi’s mind. She watches him as he turns to the window. Lifetime after lifetime has made him translucent, until she can see through his varying exterior to the constant thing within. She was wrong a hundred lives ago, when she laughed at him for saying two people are forever a mystery to each other. She knows Santi aswell as one person can know another, all his facets and sides and angles. But his heart is further from her understanding than ever. The shadows she’s seen it cast make up an impossible object, bigger and stranger than he should be able to contain. The same isn’t true of her. World by world, she’s felt herself becoming smaller, diminishing into an obvious, snarling thing whose only desire is escape. Perhaps that’s all she was, even back at the beginning she can’t remember; the rest was fragile dress-up, like her orange pinafore and her sharp comebacks, sloughed off by the hurricane of what they’ve been through. Or perhaps Santi is right. Perhaps she still gets to choose who she wants to be.

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