“You know what I need right now?” She looks at him, his haunted eyes that never really look back, always fixed on forever. “A friend. Like you’re supposed to be, in this life. Not—whatever the hell we are in the big picture. Can you just—be that for me? Just this once?”

His eyes linger for a moment on the sky. Then he offers her his arm. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll take you home.”

Jules is waiting for her when she gets back.

Thora stands by the door. Maybe this is when she fucks it up, when Jules walks out and never comes home. She could lean into it, like closing her eyes into a fall. Or she could fight to rise, stubborn against gravity all the way to the stars.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have stayed and talked to you.”

Jules doesn’t speak. Thora gets the unsettling feeling that her wife can see right through her, all the layers and versions, to the emptiness inside.

“Was Santi right?” Jules asks. “When he said you were pretending? Because—if you do feel trapped, if you want something else, I . . .” She shakes her head, dashing tears from her eyes.

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.”