The house is big. More unnerving, it’s immaculate, everything in its place. He wonders again what happened to Thora this time, what turned her into the kind of person who collects horseshoes—fifty of them, nailed in regimental order above the range cooker—and, apparently, plays the piano. He imagines his fiery, impatient Thora sitting down to practice her scales and has to stifle laughter.

He pans his flashlight up the stairs, illuminating photographs: a life flayed and hung on the wall. In most of the pictures, Thora is alone. In some, she stands next to a tall man with broad shoulders who Santi assumes is her husband. It’s odd seeing her with a man rather than a woman, until he remembers that he once stood in that place. It seems so strange to his current self, so outside anything that he would want or need from her. It feels more like a dream: the kind you wake from with a wry smile, shrugging at the tricks of the subconscious.

The husband accompanies Thora through the years, grayer and more stooped until he drops out of frame. Santi lingers on the last picture: Thora in her seventies, still tall and strong, hair hanging iron-gray to her shoulders. It took illness to reduce her to what he saw in the hospital.

Nothing so far to hint at her life being any more than ordinary. He remembers her words to him in their last life. Catch me again when I have less to lose. But she had a lot to lose this time too: a husband, a daughter, a house bigger than this version of Santi has ever been inside, let alone dreamt of owning. He turns away from her picture and continues exploring upstairs.

Fragments of the Thoras he has known lie strewn through this stranger’s house like shrapnel from an explosion. A diploma from a physics course she took as a mature student, framed above the piano; her collection of vintage sci-fi, shoved like a guilty secret behind a trailing plant. Parts of her constant self she couldn’t repress. He feels it like a victory every time he uncovers another. See, Thora? You’re still who you are. You could be born on an alien planet and still be yourself. You can’t hide from that, not in the biggest house in Cologne. The idea recasts what he’s doing, turns it into a macabre game of hide-and-seek. Thora’s body is in the ground, but by searching through what she left behind, perhaps he can recover her ghost.