She leaves him the European Space Agency badge she got at the Odysseum, the one she didn’t wear the night they met because she was afraid what people might think of her. She puts it at the back of the table, turned toward his face. She is sure, now, that she will never reach the stars. If she was on the right path, Santi would still be here, and he would be coming with her.

“I hope you found what you were looking for,” she says.

Two nights later, she buys a can of spray paint and walks to the old town at three in the morning. Over the faded words at the base of the tower she writes, for him, WELCOME TO FOREVER.

Open Your Eyes

Santi is late.

It’s not unusual: lateness is a trait in him, unchangeable as the curl in his hair. Still, there are better times for it to manifest than on the first day of a new school year. Bad enough if he was still a student: unforgivable in a teacher with twenty-five years’ experience. He hurries past the fountain in the center of the cobbled square, dodging the crowds. As he passes the ruined clock tower, he looks up to check the time, forgetting that the hands are stuck as always at eight minutes past eleven.

This morning, he woke sprawled across his bed as if he’d fallen there from an unfathomable height. It’s a dream he’s had before. This time, it took thirty minutes of walking around his apartment, examining the evidence of his life—his cat Félicette meowing for her breakfast, the tablecloth crocheted by his mother, the picture of Héloïse on the balcony, looking apprehensively at the approaching rain—until he felt like it was his own again. Now, he steps from the busy market into the quiet courtyard of the international school and tries to gather himself into coherence. Unconsciously, his hand reaches into his jacket to touch the smooth wood of his grandfather’s knife.

He enters the classroom under the gaze of thirty assembled seven-year-olds. The faces are different, but everything else is the same. The lonely déjà vu of being a teacher: living the same year over and over, surrounded by children for whom this is the only version that matters.