The next bird lands in a flurry of bright green. Thora stays as still as death until it starts pecking at the millet. She moves like a closing trap, soaking the bird with her spray bottle. As it struggles to take off, she throws the blanket over it, bundles it up, opens the cage, and releases it inside.

She closes the cage door and counts the birds. Enough for a morning’s work. She gathers her tools and starts walking backward across the park toward Ehrenfeld. She hefts the cage at an old woman following her down the path. “Never seen someone walking backward with a cage full of parakeets before?” she yells, in a nonsense pidgin of bad Czech and Icelandic.

The old woman shakes her head and takes another path. Thora laughs out loud in the illusory sunshine, feeling herself teeter on the brink of madness.

At the foot of the lighthouse, she sets the cage down. She pushes each wriggling bird through the solid concrete and lets it go. When the cage is empty, she picks up her bag of seed and pokes her head through the wall. Inside, the air is a whirling mess of birds. She scatters a few good handfuls, tops up the water feeder, then backs out onto the street.

Trying to break the world is hungry work. She heads to the old town and grabs a miracle currywurst from the van outside the cathedral, although she’s not sure it will help. For the last few lives, food has been sitting hollow in her stomach. She doesn’t plan to tell Santi. He would only say it’s a metaphor for her spiritual starvation, or something equally profound.

She’s leaning against the glass wall of the Hauptbahnhof when she sees him on the cathedral steps, sketching in his book. She finds herself thinking of the house, empty and waiting, filled with their memories. Before she’s conscious of what she’s doing, she finds herself on the next train to Fühlingen. She doesn’t understand why until she walks through the house’s empty doorway and her feet take her straight to Jules.

She looks down from the wall, vivid as life, eyes crinkling in a frank smile. Thora thinks of all the versions of Jules she has known: each, if Santi is right, an echo of the real one. She remembers the conviction that crystallized in her over time, that she could only be with Jules if she gave up the idea of elsewhere. Is that a choice she has already made? Or one she is still making?