She should tell him to leave. He’s still a little drunk: he could slip and fall, and she would have another of his deaths on her conscience. She goes along with it anyway, because every terrible idea resonates to the frequency of her misery.

The tower is taller than she remembers. She stops while they’re still inside, on a ridge of the crumbled steps where there’s just enough room for them to sit. She gasps, getting her wind back; Santi, of course, is hardly out of breath. It hammers in what lies in store: the sickening repetition of another childhood, another rush of memories, another half a lifetime alone in the déjà vu city. She scrapes her hand against the brick until it grazes. Lifetimes ago, climbing down, she looked through a gap and saw herself endlessly refracted.

“What are you thinking?” Santi asks.

She looks at his open, concerned face. Fuck it: if she doesn’t say this to him now, she never will. “I never told you what it was like. To wait.” She looks down at her boots hanging over the drop. “Twenty-five years, Santi. Longer than your whole life so far. That’s how long I was alone. Just—waiting for you to show up. And then you did, and”—her voice breaks on her laughter—“you were a baby. Can you imagine? You’re right there, but you’re not you, you’re this formless thing that can’t even talk, and I see glimpses of you in there, but it’s not enough, and everything I do to try and help you become yourself again might—it might—” She stops, swallows, finally speaks the fear that has gripped her since she first held him. “I worry I did too much. I worry I tried to turn you into someone, and I worry that it’s worked.”

His gaze is not troubled enough. “Whatever you did, you can’t have made me into a different person. I’m still me.”

“Which is exactly what I’d expect you to say.” Thora can’t articulate to him the terror of it: the only person she can’t see through becoming a mirror of herself, a creature of her own construction. She breathes out, trying to exorcise the long tension of this life, the feeling of everything being on her shoulders. “What I said before—I meant it. I can’t do this again. I can’t be so far ahead. I can’t wait for you to grow up.” Far below them, fallen leaves rustle invisibly in the dark.

“Before,” Santi says, his voice shaking. “When I said there wasn’t anything we could do about it. I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Thora looks at him. His eyes flick unmistakably down.