Thora grits her teeth. “I’d hit you if I had the strength to lift my arm.”

He laughs. As she shifts her hand on the covers, he sees that the place where the tattoo should be is blank. He’s too ashamed to roll up his sleeve and show her the copy done from memory on his own wrist, at the last tattoo shop he searched in the Belgian Quarter.

“How long have you been in Cologne?” he asks.

“Sixty-two years.”

Santi quakes with wasted time. For thirty-five of those years, he’s been alive. For fifteen, he’s been a free adult. He could have come here, found her before it was too late. “I only remembered when I got here. Again. Was it the same for you?”

She nods, eyes closed.

He leans forward. “What is it about this place? Why do we always end up here? Why do we never remember until we arrive?”

“Maybe if we left, we would forget.” She coughs, the deep, terrifying cough of the terminally ill. “You should try it,” she says when she catches her breath. “Too late for me.”

The last thing Santi wants to do is forget. And he doesn’t want to let her forget, either. “I looked after them,” he says. “Jules and Oskar, after you died. Like I promised.”

Thora’s clouded gaze doesn’t waver. “Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“Yes.” He is shaking with rage; for a blessed moment, he is not the scattered Santi of this life, but the driven one of last time. “I had a mission. I was trying to find the right path. But I gave it up, to be there for them. Because of what they meant to you.”

“You always have to be such a martyr.” She fumbles with the blanket, veined hands shaking. “I would have been there to look after them myself, if it wasn’t for you.”

Old guilt weighs him down. She was happy with Jules; he shouldn’t have interfered. But he was so consumed with the greater truth that he couldn’t fathom why she would want to hide from it. The way you live is selfish, Santi. Her words, coming back to him in his own voice. A thought strikes him, startling as sunlight. What if they are not being tested, but punished? What if the way he is now is a judgment on his failure last time?

He closes his eyes, rubbing his aching neck. He’s so tired. Lord knows when this will end, when he will have seen enough, done enough, been enough.

“Speaking of which,” Thora says, “I think you’ve kept me from my family long enough.”