It didn’t take her long to remember. The first time she walked through the old town, she felt it as a dread dogging her steps, a shadow cast the wrong way against the sun. When the cathedral bells boomed hollow through her bones, she stopped where she was, under the ruins of the clock tower. “No,” she said softly. “Not again.”

Santi wanted to understand why they only remember when they arrive here. To Thora, it’s no mystery. The city is so overlaid with their shared lives that there is no living here without remembering.

She looked up to the hands of the clock still stuck at midnight. She heard the echo of her own words to him last time. Maybe if we left, we would forget.

She tried the train first. She didn’t even think about where she wanted to go. She just got on the first one she saw and waited for it to leave. Looking out of the window, she wondered how it would be. Would she forget all at once, awaken in a glorious elsewhere with no idea how she had got there? Or would it be more gradual, a kind of healing dementia, stealing her other lives fragment by fragment until even the memory of Santi was gone? A pang tugged at her, but she resisted. Remembering had done nothing but make them miserable. Better to start afresh, even if that meant never meeting at all.

The train hummed to life. Her head snapped up. Her escape, beginning at last.

The hum cut off, the lights flickering out. A disembodied voice announced a fault. The other passengers grumbled and disembarked. Thora sat transfixed, furious, almost laughing.

She tried again and again. Sometimes, the trains got as far as crossing the river before breaking down. One stopped on the Hohenzollernbrücke with the bang of an exploding fuse. Thora sat staring at the shackles of the padlocks on the fence, forty thousand relationships left to rust. When the train pulled into reverse, she felt time unwinding, unraveling her back to where she started.

It was after she got off that train that she decided to trust nothing but herself. She won’t break down. She will walk until the road runs out, and then she will keep walking.

She climbs through a hedge and strikes across a scrubby meadow. She’s beyond the city limits now, in an endless dream of fields and fences. She holds down a coil of barbed wire to clamber across. When she lets go, it slices her thumb. She sucks the blood away and walks on.