“I keep thinking if I just draw them all out, I can find the pattern,” Santi says. “Find out which one was real.”

“Which one was real?” She stares at him. “Santi, they’re all real or none of them are real. Don’t go raking through broken glass looking for diamonds.”

He holds her gaze, eyes tired. “I don’t understand. You’re really content not to ask why?”

Thora bites her lip. She wants to tell him about the nights she wakes and hallucinates the stars, racing across the ceiling of her and Jules’s bedroom in all the constellations she remembers. But Oskar is warm in her arms, and Jules is sleeping meters away, hers at last. “If I ask why,” she whispers, “I’ll lose this.”

Santi shakes his head. “I think it’s more than that. I think you’re afraid.”

Thora snorts. “Oh, really? What am I afraid of?”

“That I’m right. That this is a test. That it requires something from us, something we may not want to give.”

“I think you’re afraid,” Thora shoots back. “You can’t face the possibility that this doesn’t mean anything. That it’s just some kind of cosmic mistake.” She lowers her voice, shifts Oskar’s weight in her arms. “You’ve been trying to pass this test, walk the right path, for lifetimes already. Where has it gotten you?”

They glare at each other until Félicette jumps up between them. Santi pets her absently. “You think she remembers?”

Thora strokes the cat’s soft black fur. “Maybe Félicette’s the key to it all.”

When he leaves, Thora presses a spare key into his hand. “No buzzer next time.”

He kisses her cheek and disappears.

Two months later, Thora is emailing pictures of Oskar to her parents when she hears a key in the door. “You’re back early,” she calls, expecting Jules.

“What about when you were my PhD supervisor?”

“Nice to see you too,” Thora remarks as Santi comes into the living room. “I assume it’s the death question again?”

He nods and sits down on the sofa, opening his memory book.

Thora casts her mind back to the brittle loneliness of that life. “In my bed, of old age. Or so I assume. Of course, there’s a chance an assassin broke in and murdered me in my sleep.” She watches Santi scribble in his book. “What about you?”

“Stroke,” he says without pausing. “I was only thirty-five.”

“You really have all the luck, don’t you?” She drops down next to him. “What are you planning to do with all this?”

“I’m close to something.” He scratches his stubble, looks up at her, wild-eyed. “What if, each time we die, it’s because we’re meant to?”