He stays for half an hour. When he gets up to leave, she follows, tailing him back across the bridge to the cathedral square; through the old town to the clock tower; onto a train to Fühlingen, where he sits on the beach by the artificial lake where they once swam as brother and sister. In every place, the same pattern: sketch, pause, scan the crowd for a face he doesn’t find. When he leaves the beach, Thora watches him cross the main road and pass through a rusted wrought-iron gate into an abandoned three-story mansion.

Her scalp prickles with curiosity. She settles down in the bushes of the overgrown garden to wait.

Finally, as the sun sinks behind the house, he emerges. Thora waits for him to pass through the gate before she sneaks up the drive, under the arched cloister, and through the house’s open doorway.

She’s not sure what she expected. But as the evening light falls through the empty windows, she finds she isn’t surprised. Santi has turned the house into his memory book. Murals cover the crumbling brick walls: world after world of the two of them, the city, the cathedral, the clock tower. And the stars, over and over, filling the gaps between.

She follows the trail of paintings up the stairs. Some lives show up again and again: the pair of them in their police uniforms, fireworks bursting around their heads; the life where they were adopted twins, Thora underwater, Santi reaching to grab her heel; two students at the top of the tower, looking up at the bewildering stars. One wall shows their parents, Thora’s sharply observed, Santi’s more impressionistic, as if it is easier for him to capture what he is less close to. On the opposite wall, their other constants: Lily and Jaime and Aurelia, Héloïse and Jules. Thora slides past them with a kind of vertigo, not daring to meet their eyes. She stops under the portrait of a long-haired man in a blue coat wearing a worried expression.

“I know you,” she says under her breath. “How do I know you?” She hunts back through her memories. A hand on her and Santi’s shoulders as they stood under the clock tower. A flash of blue against the sand, when he collapsed beside them on the beach. In a rush, it all connects. The beach. The clock tower. The Odysseum. Santi has been looking for this man, in every place they have seen him.

“Thora.”

She whirls. Santi stands in the doorway.

Thora stiffens against the wall. “Don’t come any closer.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.” He holds up his hands. “I saw you on the bridge. I know you’ve been following me.”

She stares at him. “Why didn’t you say something?”

His grimace is almost a smile. “I was too angry.”

“You’re angry?” Thora almost chokes. “You stabbed me in the heart!”