The collection spills off the edge of the corkboard, colonizing the wall. He follows threads like he’s following Thora’s thoughts, ending in knots of memory. She’s not an artist, like him. Instead of drawings, he finds snippets of different-again handwriting, like fungus growing over her respectable old-lady wallpaper. He wants to gulp her thoughts like water, but this version of him has never been a strong reader, and Thora’s latest Gothic scrawl doesn’t help. We are who we are, he makes out. We’d be completely different people. Jules, underlined. Cologne, she writes inside a circle, as if she intended to start a mind-map, but nothing connects. Then: Why do we both want the same thing, and why do we never get it? Finally, stuck to the wall like an afterthought: I’m trapped inside this bird. Santi picks up her pen and sketches a quick cartoon of a parakeet, a speech bubble containing the words.

The trail ends at the bookshelves. Santi casts his eyes over the volumes, recognizing some of his own recommendations. On the shelf below is a collection of books on memory, past lives, reincarnation. He picks up one of the more New Age volumes and opens it to the title page. Bullshit, Thora has written, underlining it three times.

There’s something else: he feels it, tingling at the tips of his fingers. He goes back to the wall where a star map is pinned, half-obscured by scribbled notes. He slides his hand up behind it and draws out an envelope addressed to him in large, self-conscious letters. He unfolds the letter inside with shaking hands.

It wasn’t written by the woman he talked to in the hospital. The paper is old, for one thing, folded and unfolded until the creases start to become tears. But even if it had been pristine, he would have known from reading it that it was the work of someone much younger.