Afterward, she leaves him in the lobby, pretending she has to go to the toilet. Feel something, she screams at herself as she climbs the endless stairs. But all she feels is justified, her fear finally coming home to roost. She finds a fire escape on the ninth floor and smokes, as she hasn’t done in six years, the symbolic pack of stale cigarettes at the bottom of her handbag. Through a gap in the buildings, under the clock that reads a quarter to eleven forever, she can see her old graffiti on the ruined tower. NO GOING BACK. She broke her rule: she made a choice. Now, here she is, exactly where she didn’t want to be. Santi will die before her, and the one solid thing in her world will be gone. The city will collapse, the towers boil away; a great hole will open in the fabric of everything, pulling her inside.

Unaware, Santi stands below her in the spitting rain, playing with his grandfather’s knife. Damn him, he looks serene. This is what he’s wanted his whole life: a real test of his faith.

When she goes down to join him, he smells the cigarette smoke in her hair. “Oh, cariña,” he says, and folds her in his arms.

Life slows down, decompresses from glimmering fragments to afternoons in the oncology ward that drag forever. One night, she wakes at his bedside with a crick in her neck and a sense of complete dislocation. Estela, she thinks in panic, but no: she’s safe with Santi’s mother.

He’s awake, looking at her with loving exhaustion. “Are you okay?”

She almost laughs in his face. No. I’m falling apart. I want to get up and run out of the hospital, out of the city, out of the world. But there are some things she can’t say to him. Things Estela can say, things his mother can say, things Jaime can say, that from her would be stabs to the heart. It’s part of the unspoken pact they made under the spoken vows, a host of small print Thora didn’t know she was agreeing to. She sits by his bedside and holds his hand, furious at the limitation of it. She doesn’t want to be his wife. She wants to be something else, something elemental and boundless. Another thing she can’t say.

She squeezes his hand. “I’m fine. I love you. Go back to sleep.”

Santi doesn’t respond to the treatment. Thora isn’t surprised. She saw all this coming, the whole sorry trajectory. She wishes she’d walked away as soon as he sat down at her table. She breaks the rules and tells Santi this, and he laughs, and she loves him, and how dare he keep on making it worse?

On Estela’s sixth birthday, he dies.