Santi presses his hands to his temples, trying to marshal his thoughts. “So your parents don’t remember.”

Thora shakes her head. “I don’t think anyone else does. Just you and me.”

Santi thinks of his constants. His mother. His father. Aurelia. Jaime. Héloïse: his wife, his girlfriend, his ex. He remembers the strange loneliness of being with her last time, the gnawing familiarity of every moment that was new to her. “Why only us?” he asks Thora. “What does it mean?”

Thora looks at him like she’s been waiting to have this conversation for decades. With a lurch of warping time, he realizes she has. “Okay, so here’s my theory,” she announces. “We’re dying.”

Santi frowns. “We’re dying?”

Thora nods vigorously. “We—I don’t know, had a car crash or fell off a bridge or something, and now we’re lying in hospital and our brains are just—going over and over different versions of our lives.” She mimes brain activity with her fingers.

Santi gently catches her hands and sets them down. “If it’s all in our heads, why is it in both our heads at the same time?”

Thora shrugs. “Maybe it’s only in one of our heads. Maybe you’re a figment of my imagination. Maybe I’m a figment of yours. Does it matter?” For the first time, Santi sees a lightness in her, a borderline hysteria he didn’t initially catch. He was so focused on her being the same Thora that the differences passed him by. What has it done to her, dealing with this alone for so long?

“Clearly it matters,” he says. “I don’t think I could imagine you. And I know I’m not imaginary.”

Thora rolls her eyes. “Of course I’d imagine you saying that.” To his unimpressed look, she says, “All right then, genius. What’s your theory?”

He doesn’t think he has one until she asks. But it seems so obvious, fresh from the renewed memory of his most recent death, that it comes to him at once. “Maybe we’re already dead.”

Thora makes a face. “And heaven is a provincial German city?”

“Not heaven.”

“Hell?”

He shakes his head. He can’t yet form it into words: the way he has felt in so many of his lives, the drive to fulfill a purpose he doesn’t yet understand. “We come back,” he says. “The same, but different. Each time with new challenges, new ways we can be better or worse.” He knocks the table, emphasizing his words. “Again and again, we’ve been given another chance.”

Thora’s eyes widen. For a moment, Santi thinks she is with him. He feels a bone-deep relief, a loneliness he has never understood finally easing. They are in this together. “You’re right,” she says. “We always get another chance. Infinite chances, to take every single path.”