“He didn’t jump.” Thora sees it more vividly than she can bear: her scarf, billowing out from the top of the tower. Santi climbing, eyes lifted past it to the stars. So sure of himself, of his one God-guided path through the world, that the possibility of falling would never have entered his mind.

She wanted to win the argument. She didn’t want this, the darkest proof of her victory: she has had an impact on his life, the worst and most permanent of all. She flashes back to her hands slipping, almost falling. Why does this feel like an exchange? As if Santi has taken her death, fallen in her place?

She quakes with anger at the person she was a few weeks ago. Better to walk away while something’s still perfect. What kind of idiot thinks like that? Who chooses perfection that doesn’t exist over messiness and complication that does?

“Did you know him?” Jules asks.

She opens her mouth. No one ever really knows anyone, she wants to say, like his ghost is at her lips. “Yes,” she says instead. Because the whole of him is inside her, prismed through that one night at the top of the tower: Santi, who wanted to reach the stars so he could see the face of God.

Jules hugs her, leaning her head on Thora’s shoulder. Jules is only seventeen, a year younger than the rest of her class, but there is something about her that makes Thora feel looked-after, safe. Relaxing into her embrace, Thora sees the future as clearly as if Santi’s ghost were speaking her fate into her ear. She will go to the bar with Jules for a consolatory drink. They will talk, and later they will kiss. She will go back to Jules’s room, three doors down from her own. It will be everything she wanted, but for a long time, she will be too numb with grief to feel it.

The next morning, she leaves Jules’s room without waking her. She goes down to the hall where Santi’s memorial has collected flowers and cards. She reads the messages, looking for any that understood him. Miss you, man. You were a good guy. God bless. Each one could have been written by a machine. The desperate loneliness of it hits her: to die in the first few weeks of university, when all someone knows of you is that you smiled at them in the library, or bought them a drink at the bar. But she knows him better.