Another silence: an opening for them to keep talking, to find a way to work this out together. But what happened last time is still an open wound between them. “I should go,” Thora says. “World’s not going to break itself, is it?”

“Keep me posted.” Santi leans back against the painting of the man in the blue coat. “If I’m not out looking for him, I’ll be here.”

Thora pauses at the top of the stairs. “Why?” she asks, gesturing at the rest of his gallery. “What’s this all for?”

“Last time, you told me none of this was real.” Thora hears the pain that hides under the words: Jules standing in the square, her face a mask of confusion; Héloïse’s hand vanishing from her grasp. Santi turns back to his paintings. “I don’t think that’s right. I think there are—pieces of the real, scattered through each life.” He brushes dust off a corner of his work. “Those pieces are what I’m trying to find.”

“You told me once that was why you started your memory book.” The dim-lit kitchen of her and Jules’s flat at two in the morning, feeding Oskar while Santi wrote a codex of their deaths. The memory hurts. Was that the last life she got right? That self seems so far away, overwritten by all the mistakes she’s made. “And if we find out what’s real?” she asks. “How does that help us get out?”

Santi closes his eyes. “The life where we met in the hostel. I thought if I could find out who I was, then I would know where I was going.” His eyes open, meeting hers. “If we find what’s real, we find the way out.”

Thora looks away. She’s not sure she wants to know who she truly is. However much she dislikes her current self, she can still find comfort in the lives where she made different choices. What if her real self has made a choice she can’t take back: a choice she can’t live with? If she stops moving, if she tries to confront who they really are, she thinks she might fall to pieces.

She nods tightly. “Good luck,” she says. “If I see your guy, I’ll let you know.”

Santi watches her leave as if he doesn’t expect her to come back.

Thora sits on the grass, a spray bottle of water in her left hand and a blanket in her right. In front of her is a plate of millet. Behind her is a cage filled with parakeets.