Santi follows her gaze to the girl hurrying across the square. He remembers her crying on the other side of a rain-spattered window, Thora’s arms around her in photograph after photograph, as if she could hold on to her through every life.

“Each time we’ve been together, I’ve fucked it up somehow.” Thora gets to her feet. “But now I remember. I won’t make the same mistakes again. I can finally make it work.”

“Thora—”

She runs, chasing after Jules, after the first of her perfect lives.

Santi watches her go, her empty wine glass left on the table, his untouched lager sparkling in the low autumn sun. In all his lifetimes, he has never felt so alone.

Part III

The Vanishing Now

Thora dozes in Jules’s arms, the light of a summer afternoon filtering through the dusty windows of the Ehrenfeld flat. In the next room, the baby sleeps, leaving them in this precious oasis of quiet.

Thora stills her rushing mind, fixes herself in how this feels: to have this life and to know how good it is. To be happy and know she is happy. Maybe it’s only possible because she remembers all the other ways it has been: Jules yelling at her from the doorway, Jules crying drunk at a table outside Der Zentaur, Jules calling her selfish, incapable of being happy where she is. And now, she is here: her head pillowed on Jules’s breast, Jules’s hand tangled in her hair. She wants to freeze herself in this moment. She already has eternity: can’t she have an eternity of this?

She knows the answer. One day, this life will be over, and she will move on to the next. She could make it happen again, she muses. Sweep Jules off her feet with words honed over lifetimes. Thora has become an expert in her, a connoisseur of her moods, a cultivator of her joys.

As Jules murmurs and shifts in her sleep, Thora feels a flicker of doubt. This isn’t the first time she’s tried. Sometimes she can’t find Jules, no matter how long she searches. Sometimes Thora is the wrong version of herself, too impatient or angry or cynical to make it work. Some lives, she barely stays upright under the weight of all the things she can’t control. She tilts her head to look up at her wife’s sleeping face. Even if she tries to do everything the same, nothing will ever be quite like this again.

The buzzer rings, stark as an alarm.

“I’ll get it.” Thora kisses Jules on the forehead, slides out of her embrace to pad to the intercom. “Who is it?” She never would have checked before. Now, with a brand-new human in their care, every action ricochets out to shape Oskar’s whole future.