“And then you blink, and look again,” she says softly. “And they’re just the stars as they are. And all you know is that things didn’t used to be this way.”

Santi stares at her. He doesn’t know if she is speaking for herself, or if he is witnessing an act of empathic imagination. Right now, it doesn’t matter. No one has ever talked to him about this as if they understood.

“That’s why I went into social work,” she says. He focuses on her expression, thoughtful and self-conscious: another letter of an alphabet he’s remembering how to read. “I felt so dislocated, so lost. I thought even if I couldn’t fix myself, maybe I could fix other people who felt like they didn’t fit. Make the world better for them.” Her eyes flick up to meet his. “But I never met anyone who felt exactly the way I did.”

“Until you met me.”

“Until I met you.”

He looks at Thora like a treasure he thought he’d lost in a fire. He knows this woman, better than he knows his own fractured self. It’s someone else’s knowledge, but for a moment he lets himself drown in it, the certainty he so rarely feels in this life. His fingers itch to draw her: a girl resting her feet on the rings of Saturn, head in her hands. Wordless, he pulls his notebook from his jacket and hands it to her.

She leafs through, hesitant at first. “You’d better not show this to anyone in the hostel,” she says dryly. “They’d kick you out sooner than you can say stalker.”

“I’m not—”

“I know,” she interrupts him. “But they won’t.” She keeps turning the pages. “Where did you get all this from?”

He looks at her. “I dreamt of you. But not as you are.”

A grin spreads across her face. “Just the idea,” she murmurs. “That I could be all these different people.” She turns the page. In this picture, she’s younger, haloed by stars, blue hair flying in the night wind. “What am I doing here?” She rotates the book, squinting. “Is that the clock tower in the old town?”

Santi nods, fingers digging into the surface of the planet. “You were sitting at the top,” he says. “Watching me fall.”

Thora looks up at him. “In your dream. Were there different versions of you as well?”

“I don’t remember.” I don’t want to remember. But he’s starting to understand: every one of her ghosts drags one of his own out with it, until he’s drowning in reflections, none of them exactly right. He has worked so hard to hold himself together, to fight the catastrophic falling-apart that drove him away from Héloïse and onto the streets. Now he feels it happening again, his center dissolving, his edges bleeding out to nothingness.