“Yes,” she says without hesitation. “Terrified. But that’s because I don’t think there’s anything after.” She shrugs. “It’s different for you. You think you’re going on to your parents and your—your sister.”

He nods, looking away across the beach. Thora imagines the two of them dying. Here, now, a comet blazing down from the sky, sending each of them where they believe they’re going. She feels a pang of strange loneliness, imagining Santi in some perfect hereafter with his real family, while she . . . She catches herself. She wouldn’t exist anymore to miss him.

Santi digs in the sand, like he’s trying to uncover something he can’t remember burying. Thora hugs her knees, thinking about the accident, how it traded away her loneliness for Santi’s pain. She has decided a hundred times over that if she could bring back his family by giving him up, she would do it. She decides it again now, closing her eyes and imagining herself alone on the beach, imagining Santi back with his real sister and his mother and father. Thora likes to dwell on things that hurt: the mental equivalent of pinching herself until her fingernails leave a pair of half-moon scars. But Santi won’t let her do that anymore.

“I never told you this,” he says. “But—for a while after they died, I was sure I was meant to be dead too.” He laughs, mocking the child he was. “I thought God had made a mistake. Any second, he was going to realize, and then, he would come to take me.” He stabs the sand in an irregular heartbeat rhythm. “The first few nights I spent in our room, I didn’t sleep. I just lay there, waiting.”

Thora remembers. She didn’t sleep, either. She lay in her familiar bed in her familiar room, staring up at the glowing constellations on her ceiling, wondering how it was that everything had changed: the empty space on the other side suddenly filled with his dark shape, his shallow, tentative breaths.

“It wasn’t hard to imagine what it’d be like. Dying, I mean. It was almost like I remembered it.” A shiver comes on Thora from nowhere, a dizziness that surges and passes. Santi’s voice wavers. “But I just kept thinking about all the things I’d never be. I’d never learn to fly. I’d never get to see the world, let alone the stars.” He’s crying now, and Thora can’t look, and she’s not made for this. She wants to dive into the lake, hide in the blue world where everything is silent and nothing weighs this much.

Santi rubs his hand across his face, leaving a trail of sand. “I wanted to see my family again. So much. But I didn’t want to die. And I—I don’t know if they’ll ever forgive me for that.”