He follows her gaze through the glass, where her loved ones watch with understandable suspicion. A man half her age they’ve never seen before, showing up at her deathbed. He gives them a wave. They look back at him, stony-faced. He stands. “I’ll leave you to say your goodbyes.”

“You should. I don’t know if I’ll see them again. You, on the other hand, I can’t escape.”

She says it like a joke, but by now he knows Thora well enough to hear real anger there too. He wants to ask her why she hid from him, why she left him alone. But her rage is a wall between them, hard and smooth as glass.

He takes her hand gently, the papery skin sliding over the fragile bones. Thora, mountain-tall in his imagination, reduced to this. She leans back against the pillow, closing her eyes. “Till next time,” she says.

At the door, he turns for one last look, angry and heartbroken in equal measure. She doesn’t open her eyes. He leaves, hurrying past her family before they can ask any questions.

She dies the following week. Andromeda lets him know with a text message and a grudging invitation to the funeral. He doesn’t go. The memory of seeing her put in the ground, Jules weeping at his side, is too fresh. Instead, he goes to the address he found in her file. From across the road, he stares disbelieving at a big, boxy house framed by climbing roses. It bears no relation to any of the Thoras he has known: as if she knew the only way to hide from him was to distance herself entirely from what she was. His own words on the tower come back to him, as if young, blue-haired Thora whispers them mockingly in his ear. We’d be the same people whatever happened to us. She has turned her entire life into a point in their never-ending argument.

Someone is watching. A neighbor at the window, phone in her hand. Santi sees himself from her perspective: a young man in a hoodie and dirty jeans, staring intently at a dead woman’s empty house. He shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps walking.

That night, he comes back and breaks in. As he climbs through the back window into what looks like a library, he thanks his criminal childhood for teaching him the skills he needs. The sense of a pattern, a plan, gives him serenity as he pulls the window closed. He moves away before clicking on his flashlight.