Her mouth moves. The reason won’t form itself into words; it’s nothing but an inarticulate scream. “I just—I’m not going to let you kill yourself falling.” Again. She bites back the impossible word. Her head pounds, another migraine drowning her in images. A yellow scarf on a nail, blowing in the night wind. An old man smiling, leaving her treatment room for the last time. A hospital bed, Santi tied up in tubes and wires—she is losing him by pieces and their daughter has to watch, and she’s too young, why couldn’t the cancer have waited until Estela was grown, until she could understand—

López steps close to her. His voice is demanding, desperate. “Tell me why.”

Thora’s throat is dry. She can’t say it. But she can: this is López. She can say anything. “Because you died here.”

He smiles, almost in relief. “I know.” He turns to look up at the tower. The harsh lights in the square turn his face to an orange-and-black skull. “I remember falling. I remember not believing it, not understanding how the universe could have allowed my hand to slip.” He looks at her. “It felt like I had a long time to think about it. And by the time I hit the ground, I knew. It was right. I was meant to die, there and then, and there was nothing I could have or should have done about it.”

“It was my fault,” Thora says, cutting him off. “Not God. Not the universe. It was my fault it happened then, and I’m not going to let it happen now.”

López laughs. “Thora,” he says gently, as if she’s a child who still doesn’t understand.

He’s never called her by her first name before. Not in this life. Thora meets his eyes. She doesn’t see her colleague, the partner she fell in with so easily that Lily joked they must have known each other in a past life. She sees her teacher, her student, her brother, her husband, her father: a vortex of realities spinning and collapsing together.

“Santi?” she says, as the universe explodes.

A boom, deep and reverberating. Then another. Thora looks up. The sky is full of stars, bursting and falling, burning out in trails of smoke. The New Year’s fireworks, exploding above the river. Between the blasts, the cathedral bells toll an interrupted midnight.

They have two seconds to look at each other. Two seconds to share the revelation that is turning them inside out: a blossoming, a bonfire, an ecstasy of remembering. Then everything happens at once. Thora sees the man emerge from the gap in the tower. Santi sees her face and turns. Before Thora can move, the man is already slashing at Santi’s throat.