Thora didn’t realize how much she counted on his unwavering faith until, at the last, it wavers. He clings to her hand, as if he doesn’t want to go where his God is waiting for him. Afterward, she waits for the better part of a year, insanely and sincerely, for him to come back. She doesn’t tell anyone: they’re already watching her. Lily, her parents, Aurelia, who has moved to Cologne to help with Estela. If they knew that every time she hears footsteps on the stairs, she thinks it’s Santi coming home, they would move in, frighten his ghost away. So she bites down on her grief and stays silent.

They had ten years. It wasn’t enough. Even if sometimes, it felt like eternities; even if the time expanded as it turned, like the spiral arm of a galaxy.

She thinks about leaving. Once, she even takes Estela to the Hauptbahnhof, standing in the long arcade as trains to elsewhere flash up on the screens. She walks out without buying a ticket. The time to leave was before she met him. Now, she has too much tying her here: her job, Estela’s school, the way Aurelia uprooted her life to come and support her. She doesn’t admit to herself that none of that really matters. What makes her stay is one mad thought: if she leaves, Santi won’t know where to find her.

Estela changes, as if the part of her that was Santi’s daughter died when he did. Gradually, she becomes someone new, not like him and not like Thora either. Someone they made up out of bits of themselves, like mad inventors. It has never seemed more miraculous, or more cruel. Thora tucks her daughter in, kisses her forehead. She wonders when she consented to have a spear driven into her chest, on the understanding that the wound would stay open forever: that through the whole procedure, she would remain impossibly alive.

“Where’s Papa?” Estela asks.

A little more blood lost. “Sweetheart, Papa died,” Thora says.

“I know,” says Estela seriously. “But where is he?”

Thora’s head swims. She wonders if Estela has talked about this with her grandparents. One set would have told her Santi is in heaven. The other would have told her what they told Thora at the same age, after her uncle died: that he just didn’t exist anymore.

“Where do you think?” she asks.

Estela casts her eyes to the ceiling, covered in glow-in-the-dark stars since before she was born. A memory snags Thora like barbed wire: Santi up a ladder, laying out a universe for his daughter.

“I think he’s somewhere else,” says Estela. “Waiting.”

Thora’s breath catches. It’s so strange, hearing her own inexplicable conviction from her daughter’s mouth, that she’s afraid to ask her what she means. “Waiting for what?” she finally says.