The thought finds him at a locked door on the second floor. He’s lost count of how many rooms he’s explored: this is the first one that wasn’t left open. Behind this door is what she values. He jiggles the lock, considers using his knife: but no. He senses that this room is meant for him. Thora would have left the key somewhere he would know to find it.

He steps back, clicking off the flashlight. When they lived together, in their apartment in the Belgian Quarter, they kept the spare key outside the front door, under a boot scraper shaped like a cat.

Santi peers through the warped glass of the front door, checking for passing lights before he cautiously opens it. There, on the step: the same boot scraper, or its near-identical twin. “Hi, Félicette,” he breathes, missing the cat he never had in this world. He lifts it gingerly and finds the key underneath.

The secret room opens. Feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, Santi pushes the door inward, meeting resistance. He gropes his way past bulky shapes to the window and pulls down the blind before clicking on the flashlight.

A smile spreads across his face. This is Thora’s house, all right. The chintzy order of the public rooms gives way to a chaos he remembers. His flashlight flits over childhood toys, some he recognizes; books that didn’t make it onto the overflowing shelves; a perplexing collection of china shards, as if one day Thora destroyed all her crockery in a fit of rage. A skull sits propped on a dressmaker’s dummy, a memento mori to which he gives a respectful nod. Around the dummy’s neck, tied in a careful knot, is a familiar mustard-yellow scarf.

A desk in a blocked-off fireplace draws his eye. Propped against it is a corkboard covered in scraps of paper and string. Santi remembers a hostel room, the map of his madness pinned on the wall. A map Thora never saw. Still, she has unconsciously copied it here, in the life where she tried to distance herself from him the most. Santi thinks of the neatly arranged rooms of her sprawling house, of this room lurking inside, a container for his ghost. He can’t help the smile that breaks across his face. A part of her couldn’t resist trying to solve their mystery, no matter what she had to lose.