Dear Santi,

I once asked my father if it was possible to remember someone you’d never met. He, of course, turned it into a philosophical treatise about the nature of memory: how remembering is an act of reconstruction, increasingly distant from the experience that formed it. But that wasn’t what I meant. I meant you. You, my brother, my friend, my partner in so many ways, all your selves scattered across my memory like the fragments of light cast by a prism.

I thought I’d know better who I was without you. But in trying to hide from you, to kill any part of me that you might recognize, I’ve only ended up hiding from myself. It’s too late for me to make a different choice. This is my life now. Until the next one.

I wanted to live every life, to be every possible version of myself. But losing Jules and Oskar taught me that you were right. We can’t live in pieces. Now, I wish I could forget. Part of me thinks that if I can make it through one life without meeting you, then the cycle will end, and I’ll be free. Maybe we both will.

But part of me still imagines it. Maybe one day you’ll walk up to me, with that impossibly remembered smile, and say it’s all part of the plan. I can’t say I’ll be pleased to see you. It would mean you knew how to find me, even when I couldn’t find myself. It would mean there really is no escaping you. But it would be a relief to stop missing someone I’ve never met.

Day by day this world feels more shallow to me, more full of holes. Perhaps one day, I’ll fall through one of them. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

Þ

Santi traces the thorn of her signature and realizes he’s crying.

He reads the letter again, imagining the words spoken by the woman he saw in the photographs. He gets the feeling he would have liked this version of Thora. The ease of her life has given her space to blossom, pushing back the tendency to bitterness that grows so readily in her. Maybe she was right, in a way she didn’t recognize: maybe she is a better version of herself without him.

Absorbed, he doesn’t notice the flashing blue light through the edges of the blind until the police are already banging on the door.