“I didn’t intend to.” Her expression doesn’t soften. Santi almost laughs as he sits down opposite her. “Thora, you can’t blame me for getting stabbed.”

“Can’t I?” she says under her breath, as if he’s set her a challenge. How can she be simultaneously so ageless and so teenage? “Glad you finally turned up, anyway,” she continues, waving to get Brigitta’s attention. “I’ve been waiting for someone to order me a wine.”

Santi, still half-absorbed in the life that brought him here, tries to focus. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.” She looks him up and down. “What are you, fifty?”

“Forty-five.” He blinks at her in confusion. “Why am I older again?”

“That’s your question?” She throws her head back in a laugh. “Shit, we have a lot to talk about. Where have you been?”

Brigitta comes to take their order. Santi asks for a glass of red wine and a Kölsch. “Spain,” he says. “Then France. I was . . .’ He closes his eyes, trying to reconcile the version of him that awoke on the train and the myriad others that are waking now at the sound of Thora’s voice. “I—wasn’t happy with what I was doing. Consultancy. It felt—hollow. I wanted to do something real. Make the world better.” He shakes his head in dismay. “I moved here to take a job with a nonprofit helping refugee kids. I was so sure I’d finally found what I was meant to be doing.” The certainty already seems quaint, the lost dream of a dead man.

“So far, so Santi.” Thora accepts her wine from Brigitta and takes a gulp. “Couldn’t you have had your epiphany a little sooner? I’ve been here for years.”

He shakes his head. “I only remembered when I got here.”

“Convenient. Meanwhile, of course, I’ve known since I was ten.” She swirls the wine around her glass. “That led to some interesting conversations with my parents. My mum basically improvised an entire treatise about Western ideas of the immortal soul in relation to Eastern ideas of reincarnation.”

Santi frowns. “I thought the idea of reincarnation was that you don’t come back as the same person.”

Thora stares at him. “We don’t.” She lowers her voice, looking around at the other tables. “Santi, we were married. Don’t take this the wrong way, but even if we were the same age, the person I am now would never.” She sits back, regards him critically. “And I don’t think you would either. Not as you are.”

He shrugs. “Details.”

She looks at him in disbelief. Then she laughs.

“What?”

“I feel like I’ve had this argument with you before.”

“We’ve probably had them all before.”

“We’ve never argued about whether we’ve had this argument before,” Thora points out.

Santi smiles. “I guess not.”

“One thing never changes. I always win,” says Thora with satisfaction.