But Estela doesn’t answer. She rolls over, and Thora is left to pour herself a glass of wine and sit on the sofa with Félicette, old now and almost blind, her rattling purr a bare threnody of mourning.

Thora goes on, out of spite and habit and love for her daughter. Estela grows up, all her quirks and silliness transmuted into the best person Thora knows: an alchemy she will never understand. Thora stays in the top-floor flat in the Belgian Quarter, not listening when Estela tells her it’s too many stairs, not caring when she becomes a shuffling old woman who takes fifteen minutes to climb them. Lily, when she comes around, tells her she feels time speeding up, that the moments slip through her hands too fast. Thora disagrees. For her, time stretches like the universe is being poured into a funnel, leaving great vacancies behind.

Lily gives her a knowing smile. “You think you’re going to see him again.”

“No!” It comes out automatically: she is a skeptic, has been since before she knew the word to describe it. She is an accident of atoms, and when life is done with her, she will disperse. But Lily is right. Deeper than thought, deeper than her deepest principles, is that irritating conviction, like his faith is a virus that has been incubating silently inside her. It is unthinkable that she won’t see him again.

Her lip curls, not with sadness but with anger. How dare he do this to her? She could have been different without him: a whole person, as she was meant to be, not pathetically waiting for a dead man to return. All it would have taken was one choice. “I could have walked away,” she says, defiant.

Lily squeezes her shoulder and goes to make more tea.

When it comes, finally—pneumonia, racking her lungs until each cough shakes her apart—it feels like it’s happened before. She assumes it’s her brain shutting down, déjà vu as an epiphenomenon of dying consciousness. She wishes Santi were here so she could argue with him about it.

Estela is there, in the blurred region where her awareness fades. She’s crying, and her sorrow hurts, tears salting the wound that still hasn’t killed her. With the last of her strength, Thora squeezes her daughter’s hand.

“I made the wrong choice,” she tells her. “I take it back. I want to start again.”

Love Is War

Santi meets his daughter for the first time when she is eleven. She’s tall for her age, with straight eyebrows and lank hair scraped into a high ponytail. Her long sleeves hide her hands.

“This is Thora,” says the social worker. “Thora, this is Mr. and Mrs. López.”

“Santi,” he says, holding out his hand. She takes it without meeting his eyes.