She teaches him how to write her name. He’s five now, a restless, inquisitive boy: getting him to sit still and focus is a challenge. But he will do it for Thora. She shows him the thorn, then gets him to copy it. He concentrates, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

“You won’t have to use this one in any other words,” she explains. “It’s a special letter, just for my name.”

“I know,” he says irritably. “I remember.”

She freezes. Maria is across the room, brushing Aurelia’s hair.

“You remember?” Thora says.

“Yes.” He goes over the lines of the thorn like he’s carving it. “You showed me. When we were up on top of the tower.”

Thora looks up at Maria, but she’s laughing. “Santi, you do love to make up stories.”

His brows knit together. “It’s not a story,” he insists.

“You’re right,” Thora says. She looks Santi in the eye. “It was real. It happened.”

From then on, he watches her with a new kind of attention. Thora relives the loneliness of remembering, no one less than a world away who could understand. Whatever effect she might be having on Santi, at least he gets to grow up with the one person who can tell him he’s not crazy.

She tries to learn from the gaps in how he once raised her. Where he was stern, she is gentle; where he tried to give her space to find her own answers, she tells him frankly what she thinks and lets him decide whether or not he agrees. Even as his memories fill out, she longs to hurry him, fill him with truths he’s not ready for. He’s only eight, talking about going to Australia one day, when she snaps.

“No, you won’t,” she says. “We can’t go anywhere. This is it, for you and me.”

He looks up at her, lip trembling. “Why?”

She knows she should soothe him, tell him she was only joking. But she’s furious, and for an instant all her fury is directed at him. Grow up, she wants to scream. Grow up and help me find a way out.

“That’s a really good question, Santi,” she says instead. “You know what I think? I think it’s because we’re being punished.”

His brow furrows. “What did we do?”

“Who knows?” Thora says brightly. “But it must have been something really, really bad.”

Santi’s eyes go wide and frightened. “I’m not bad. You’re lying.” He flees to his room and doesn’t talk to her for the rest of the day.

When Maria comes home, she’s puzzled. “What did you say to him?”

That his dreams are dust and ashes. Thora shrugs helplessly. “He’s sensitive. You know what he’s like.”