“They gave me the day off, after—yesterday. This place calms me down, when I feel—” Mid-sentence, her attention snaps back, as if she’s just caught sight of herself. Every second of this interaction is another stain on the carefully controlled relationship her job requires them to have. If she were anyone else, Santi would expect her to walk away. But he has already learned that his expectations are no map for her territory. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “Guessed your name, told you what it means. They—they told me that’s one of your triggers. Thinking people know more about you than they should.”

Her words let another ghost in to possess him. This one is wry, certain, her equal. “But you do, don’t you?”

She takes a breath. “I don’t want to lie to you,” she says. “I do find you—familiar.” She meets his eyes with frank annoyance. “But that doesn’t mean you’re right. All it means is that this kind of delusion can happen to anyone.”

It’s so unexpected, so off-script, that he laughs. “Why did you tell me that? You’re supposed to just tell me it’s all in my head.”

She looks at him seriously. “I want you to trust me.”

He doesn’t know what to say. But what comes out, surprising him as much as her, is the truth. In all the different versions of him she brings out, there is one constant. “I do.”

She nods, looking away. Visibly, under her breath, she says, Fuck it. “Can I get you a coffee?”

She buys him a black coffee without asking how he takes it. They head out the back way, past a closed-off room marked “Under Construction” into a playground filled with fiberglass models of the planets. The breeze off the river is cold. Thora pulls a mustard-yellow scarf out of her bag and wraps it around her neck before climbing up to sit with her feet on the rings of Saturn. She offers Santi her hand. He clambers up to sit next to her, on the same planet as another person at last. Two meters and four hundred million miles away, two small children battle to throw each other off Jupiter. Santi feels a strange sense of loss. Beyond the riverfront plaza, the Hohenzollernbrücke stretches over the water, tying them back to the city.

“Have you ever looked at the locks?” he asks.

Thora raises an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”

He points. “On the bridge. All those padlocks. Two tons of them.”

Thora takes out a pack of cigarettes, offers him one. He takes it for later. She lights hers, blows the smoke away from him. “I’ve seen them, yes. Joey plus Bobby forever, et cetera.”

“But have you ever looked at them?” He sits forward. “I mean, really looked at them. Walked all the way across the bridge, following the fence, paying attention.”