“Who said this is my dream?” She rolls over, sighing. “Anyway, it can’t be a dream. It makes too much sense. If it was a dream, you’d be yourself but also my old physics teacher, and you’d be giving a surprise test I haven’t prepared for while an army of goats tries to break the door down.”

“I was your old physics teacher,” he reminds her.

She makes a face. “If you think that turns me on, you still have a lot of lives to get to know me.” She slides out of bed, pulling on a long cardigan and padding across the floorboards to the kitchen. He reaches for her, protesting, but she’s gone, the sound of the filling kettle presaging coffee. A meow and a clatter echo from the kitchen. “Jesus, Félicette!”

He smiles. “Is she disrupting the space-time continuum again?”

“No more than usual.” Thora pauses in a patch of sunlight, biting her nails. In that moment, she dazzles him, as though she is a window through which comes some rare and incandescent light. Thoughts move across her face like storm clouds. He wants to draw her, to collect this moment in his memory book. He wonders sometimes if his search for meaning has driven him crazy, if he is nothing but a mad old man filling his pockets with bright pebbles from the gutter. He hears the voice of another Thora. Don’t go raking through broken glass looking for diamonds.

“I had that dream again,” he says.

Thora’s face changes. There are parts of her he will never see, his presence irrevocably altering how she is at rest. She turns as she pours the coffee. “The one where we’re in the stars?”

He nods, looking up at the ceiling. “I really thought we’d found the answer.” He returns to the idea he has clung to since his time on the streets, like a talisman worn smooth with rubbing. The key is to know who you are. Only then will you know where you’re going. Does it feel true because it is, or because he wants it to be? He rubs his eyes, trying to dispel the blur from his dream. “I’ve been so sure, so many times, and it’s always ended the same way.” The same way, or worse. He looks down at his hands, remembering where his certainty once led him. A knife in Thora’s heart.

She comes back to bed, a mug in each hand. “This time, I was sure too.” A ghost of a smile crosses her face. “Both of us sure of the same thing. When has that happened before?”

Santi ponders the strange convergence of their perspectives: the moment they looked at each other and knew absolutely where they had to go. It felt like it meant something. But he’s had that feeling too many times to trust it.