She takes the spray can from her backpack. NOTHING TO LOSE, she writes, big enough to be seen across the square, across the distance between worlds. When he sees it, he’ll know what it means. That she’s finally ready for them to find a way out of this together.

When enough time has passed after painting her message that she’s sure he’s not already in the city, she relearns enough Spanish to call the hospitals in the town he is usually born in. She’s sure she becomes a local joke, the foreign girl with the bad accent who keeps asking for the child who doesn’t exist. Spain isn’t the only possibility: in some lives, his parents move to Cologne before he is born. Every week, she flicks through the local paper to the birth announcements, scours them like a hurricane survivor haunting a missing-persons board. After a few years, she stops expecting to find him there. It becomes a game to her, a quirk to her friends, used to her leafing through the Stadt-Anzeiger and reading out the most ridiculous names as they drink coffee at her big kitchen table.

She’s a doctor now, training to be a surgeon. It was her plan before she remembered, and a resentful part of her didn’t want to give it up. She leafs through the paper as Lily laments over the same guy she’s been obsessed with for lifetimes, feeling five hundred years old.

Lily leans over her shoulder. “Dennis,” she says. “Imagine that. Baby Dennis.”

Thora gives her a look. “Where did you think all the adult Dennises came from?”

“Made in a factory,” Lily says, but Thora barely hears her, because there he is, in a small announcement at the top of the page: Santiago López Romero.

Her ears fill with thunder. He’s here. He’s alive.

“Thora?” Lily waves a hand in front of her face. She follows Thora’s gaze. “Ooh, Spanish. Hot name.” She frowns. “Is it weird to say that about a baby?”

“Yes,” Thora says and turns the page, already thinking about how she can meet him.

She tries the hospital first, but Santi and his mother have already gone home. She redirects her attention to finding out where that home is. In the worlds where they live in Cologne, Santi’s mother usually works in a shop in the city center. On her lunch breaks, Thora begins an irregular circuit of likely candidates. She’s two months into her search when she walks into a mini-market near the church where she and Santi once got married and sees his mother standing behind the counter.