“How—how are you?” he asks.

It’s such an absurd question that he expects her to laugh. She doesn’t even smile. “Jules just left me,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “So there’s that.”

Santi wishes for the power of flight, of teleportation, any miracle that would get him out of this conversation. “I thought it was in my control,” Dr. Lišková says. “I thought I could just—choose not to let her go.” As she taps the ash off the cigarette, Santi notices a tattoo on her wrist: stars, in a vaguely familiar pattern. “Maybe if I’d done something differently,” she goes on. “Maybe when I asked her to move back to the Netherlands with me, I could have done it in a way that made her say yes.” She takes a drag on her cigarette. “Maybe there’s a universe where I did, and I’m in our beautiful flat in Amsterdam with her right now, instead of making a fucking idiot of myself in front of my student.”

Santi’s memory fractures. Another moment, another argument. A lock of blue hair against the night sky. He blinks the phantom away. “I don’t think it works that way,” he says.

“Of course you would know how it works.” She tips her wine back, seems upset to discover that it’s empty. She waves the glass at him. “Hey. Can your friend up there stand me another?”

Santi’s fists clench. He looks away, across the square at the graffiti on the clock tower. NOT ENOUGH SKY.

“I did it,” Dr. Lišková says.

For a second, he doesn’t know what she means. Did what? Torpedoed her relationship? Put away enough wine to tranquilize a horse? Then he follows her gaze to the graffiti. “The message?” He stares at her. “You’re saying you wrote it?”

She nods.

It can’t be, but it is. Dr. Lišková, his distant, skeptical supervisor: the kindred spirit he’s been waiting to find. Finally, he understands the feeling of magnetic repulsion between them, matching poles straining for distance. He laughs aloud. “It’s you,” he says. “You’re the other person who remembers.”

The directness of her drunk gaze is overwhelming. “What are you talking about?”