Santi sees his reflection in the glass, hooded and wary, before he smashes it. Pulling his sleeve over his hand, he reaches through the jagged hole and opens the window, brushing the shards off the sill so he can climb through. He drops and crouches, waiting for the echo of broken glass to give way to silence. When he’s sure he’s alone, he straightens up in the nighttime hush of the university’s alumni relations office. Somewhere in this dusty room, crammed with old computers and filing cabinets, he will find Thora.

He’s been hunting her since he arrived in Cologne six months ago. Not by train, this time: in the passenger seat of a stranger’s car, in the middle of a long, straggling hitchhike across Europe, fleeing the mess he’d left behind him in Spain. He never meant it to be the end, just another stop on his journey. But when he saw the skyline of the city, he wept without knowing why.

His driver looked across in perplexed sympathy. “You been traveling a long time, man?”

“I guess.” But as the city coalesced around him, Santi couldn’t shake the feeling that he had never really been anywhere else.

His driver dropped him at the Hauptbahnhof. He walked out into the cathedral square, memories coming to him in snatches, a melody heard through broken headphones. Sitting on these steps, sketching the twin spires into his notebook. Hurrying out of the station on a frosty morning, gulping the last of his coffee as he headed for the police headquarters. He still didn’t understand until a man in a blue coat came up to him and touched his arm. “You’re here.”

Santi stared at him, his haunted face, his long hair knotting in the breeze. He couldn’t shake the idea that the man was transparent: that if he looked hard enough, he could see through him to what he stood for.

“You’re here,” the man said again.

Santi looked up at the cathedral. “I am here,” he echoed. The words slid through his mind, solidified into an image, stark capitals on a wall. The letters shifted. Not I. We.

Thora, the last time he saw her. Gasping with pain, her hand tight on his, clinging to the life she was desperate not to leave.

The man in the blue coat was walking away. “Wait,” Santi called after him. “Where’s Thora?”

The man looked at Santi as if the question didn’t make sense. “Here,” he said.

Santi worked it out as he ran through the old town, stumbling over lives and deaths to find the one that mattered. Last time, he outlived Thora by forty-five years. He was thirty-five now, so she must be eighty. God, let her still be alive. He quickened his pace, the last words she had said to him burned into his mind. I never want to see you again.