When he gets home, Héloïse is pruning her bonsai tree. She sits in the window in the last of the winter light, swearing softly in French as she wrangles the branches into a more pleasing arrangement. She doesn’t know it has been a lifetimes-long project. Like his drawing, Santi thinks; but without the chance to remember, to grow, Héloïse still never quite gets it right.

For a moment, he just watches her, this woman he knows so asymmetrically: each version of their relationship new to her, while he sees only the echoes of what came before. There is truth here, he realizes, in the place where all their histories intersect.

“You’re late,” she says without looking up.

Santi stoops to stroke Félicette as she rubs against his ankles. “I ran into an old friend.”

Héloïse abandons the tree with a dismissive gesture and comes over to kiss him. Her brown eyes scan him as she pulls back. “Hmm. Evasive.” A smile plays around her mouth. “Is this your way of telling me you’re running off with a hot German?”

He could say yes. He could walk out now, with no explanation. Or, he could do what he did the last time he was with her, the same thing Thora did to Jules: tell her his truth until it breaks her. As he watches her face, he doesn’t sense that any of it would come as a surprise. He recognizes the constant note in their relationship: she is always, somehow, waiting for him to leave.

Perhaps, for once, he can surprise her. “Not this time,” he says, and draws her into his arms.

A week later, at Der Zentaur, he is arguing with Thora. It’s cold for sitting outside, but she wanted to smoke. Santi feels the ghost of a previous self’s craving as she taps away the ash.

“I don’t understand why you don’t understand.” She leans across the table. “I’m saying you were right, about you and me. We’re not made to live in the world like other people. We’ll always, always want what’s beyond. We’ll always want out.”

“I agree,” he says. “But what you’re doing—living in the gaps, refusing to engage with it as reality—that’s not getting out. That’s going further in.”

Thora sips her wine. “How is acting like this is real going to get us out?”

Santi pauses. He considers telling her that he is still looking for atonement, for the freely given sacrifice that will lead him to redemption. But he’s afraid she will pull him away from his purpose, like she has done so many times before.