He didn’t seriously think she had meant it until he arrived at Der Zentaur and she wasn’t there. He stood scanning and rescanning every table, looking for an old woman with Thora’s eyes.

“Can I help you?”

Brigitta, familiar as a ghost. Santi reached for her in relief. She backed away, holding up her hands.

“Sorry,” he said, clenching his fists. “I’m looking for someone. She—she’s a regular here. An older woman, tall, English accent. Her hair—she might have dyed it.”

Brigitta shook her head. “I don’t recognize that description.”

When Santi left the bar and looked across the square, he laughed. Written on the clock tower in bold black letters was Thora’s message: NEVER MEANS NEVER.

It should have convinced him she meant it. But a message telling him to stay away was still a message: words she chose to write, knowing he would read them. He couldn’t help taking it as a challenge.

A challenge that led him to this dark office, papers blowing across the floor in the breeze through the broken window. Something moves in the corridor. Santi presses himself against the wall, heart thundering. He remembers, in other lives, being calm, confident, a person with solid edges. Now, he is unraveling like a piece of his mother’s crochet, loose threads catching on every sound. He takes in shallow breaths, trying to get himself under control: not his own, but the control of something he is not sure anymore whether to call God.

He tried to do this the right way first. After half a year fruitlessly haunting the Odysseum, the arts cinema, the LGBT center, the Turkish café in Ehrenfeld, the tattoo shops in the Belgian Quarter—every place that spoke to him of Thora, everywhere she could have left some trace—he went in desperation to the university.

“I’m trying to get in touch with someone,” he said. “She might have gone here sixty years ago.”

The receptionist looked at him over his glasses. “Do you have a name?”

“Thora Lišková.” Saying her name aloud was like uttering a prayer. As he spelled it out, he remembered her hand carving the letters one by one into the tower, so many lives ago.

The receptionist frowned. “Sorry, nothing’s coming up.”

Of course. If she was hiding from him, the first thing she would have done was change her name. “Can I—can I see some pictures? I’d know her if I saw her, I would—”

The receptionist looked him up and down: his old clothes, his foreign accent, his shaking hands. “I’m sorry. Are you an alumnus of the university?” Santi shook his head. Not this time. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. We have to protect the privacy of our alumni. I’m sure you understand.”