It’s easy to fall into being Maria’s friend. Thora goes from attending the crochet circle to dropping by for coffee to offering to watch the kids once a week. In this world, Santi’s father died of a heart attack, and Maria is drowning. Thora tells herself she is a good person for reaching out to save her, even as she knows it is the most purely selfish thing she has ever done. She is almost sure Santi will forgive her once he’s old enough. Right now, though, he can’t even say his own name. She watches him crawl across the floor in pursuit of a ball he can barely grasp and feels helpless, like she is what he is trying to hold on to.

She remembers from other lives how it feels to know someone as a child, then meet them again full-grown: the shock of seeing a person emerge from such chaotic potential. Now, for the first time, she sees it from the other side. She has known so many Santis: her father, frazzled but trying his best; her intense, philosophical student; her absent-minded police partner. Now there is just this ball of curious sensation that she has to periodically prevent from destroying itself. Inside are the seeds of all the Santis that could exist. Or not quite all: the trajectory of this life, his parents moving to Cologne, his father’s death, have already set him on a path away from some of the people he might have been. Uneasily, she adds herself to the list. What might it do to him, spending so much time with someone who has such a clear notion of who he should be? How might her responses, to something as simple as him pressing a pointed star into her palm, push him off one path and onto another? A dozen times, she decides to remove herself from his life, come back when he’s older. But Maria has come to rely on her, and even Aurelia is thawing, coming to sit with her, braiding her hair while she tells her about her stuffed animals and their adventures. And even if Santi isn’t Santi yet, even if he can barely say her name, she is not strong enough to willfully detach her fingers from the only ledge between her and an endless fall.

And it seems the feeling is mutual. Each time she leaves for the hospital, he clings to her, wailing his distress.

Maria rescues her. “Thora has to go make people better, mi hijo,” she says, clawing him off Thora’s leg. “I’m sorry.”

“Fora,” Santi says insistently. The terror in his eyes isn’t natural. It’s the same as when he sat by her hospital bed, as when he held her broken body in the gutter.

“I’ll come back,” she tells him, a bitter promise he doesn’t yet understand. “I always come back.”