They get married in Great St. Martin’s, the church that looks like a fairy-tale castle tucked behind the pastel-colored houses of the waterfront. Jaime, Santi’s friend from work, is his best man; Lily is Thora’s maid of honor. As they come out of the church, the bells in the tower are ringing. Thora feels like she’s ringing too, picking up a vibration and humming with it until it threatens to shatter her. She lets it spill out of her in bursts of laughter.

They have their reception at the Odysseum. Their guests roam the pretend planetarium, eating freeze-dried canapes under the glassy gazes of ghostly astronauts. It’s as funny as Thora hoped it would be, especially when the dancing starts. She spins with Lily, throwing her head back as she laughs. In one corner, her father is trying to talk to Santi’s father in Latin, and in another, Aurelia is laughing at them both, and in another, Santi is watching her, his whole heart in his eyes.

The next day, Thora slips out of the flat early without waking him. He’s still a light sleeper, but the hangover has sent him deep enough that he doesn’t stir. She walks in the opposite direction she walked the last time she left him, into the heart of the city. At the ruined clock tower, opposite the place where they met for the first time, she takes a permanent marker from her pocket. NO GOING BACK, she writes on the wall. She has made her choice. She’s still afraid.

She never expected what being happy would do to time. It speeds up, sliding away under her fingers, distorting into fantastic shapes. She tries to cling to every moment. Coming home after the sci-fi festival and arguing so loudly about the ending of the last film that the neighbors call the police. Santi singing to himself in the kitchen, doodling tiny versions of the two of them on the table until it forms an imperfect record of their lives. Her Spanish getting hesitantly better, until she manages a joke that makes his father laugh for half an hour. Santi bringing her cookies at Christmas as she sits watching the snow fall, pregnant and lazy.

“My love,” he says.

She just stares at him, the impossibility of him. “There shouldn’t have been room for this,” she says.

“What?”

“In the time we’ve known each other. There shouldn’t have been—this shouldn’t be possible.”

“What?” he says again, with a smile.

For me to love you this much. It frustrates her, as his proposal frustrated her, triggering a deep sense of not understanding. Thora likes to understand. But she can’t say it. He knows. He has to know.

“Nothing.” She grabs a cookie and stuffs it in her mouth.