“Liar,” he spits. “You’re like me. You want to know. You want to understand. You want to seek, and find, and—and touch what you can’t explain. Not—bury yourself and hide away from it.” He’s shouting into her face, but she refuses to flinch. “Why are you pretending to be someone else?”

Thora stares at him. She can’t say it. Because that’s who Jules needs me to be. She doesn’t know where it comes from, this conviction that seeking elsewhere and being with Jules are mutually incompatible: that she can only have one if she gives up the other.

“What’s happening?”

Thora turns, heart in her mouth. She doesn’t know how long Jules has been standing there, towel-wrapped and dripping.

“Fuck.” Thora panics. She heads for the door. “I have to go.”

“Where?” Jules reaches for her. “Can we talk about this?”

Thora shakes her off, pulling on her boots. “I’m reliably informed that there’s no point talking to me when I’m like this.”

Jules stands shivering, water beading on her shoulders. Her expression, pinched and wary, is too familiar. This is how she looks when it all goes wrong. “Thora, please—”

Thora hovers on the threshold. She had one plan for this life: Jules above everything. But she can’t stay here, teetering on the edge of the chasm Santi has ripped through their lives. She crashes down the steps, drowning in echoes: a hundred stairwells overlaying each other, and she’s running down them all at once. She bursts out onto the street where the lighthouse points like an accusing finger at the sky. It all looks wrong to her now: the city she has been trying so hard to see as real, disintegrating into fragments before her eyes.

“Thora!”

She looks over her shoulder to see Santi running after her. She ducks down a side street, emerges by the mosque on the edge of the park, its high glass windows mirroring back a hundred fractured selves. She keeps running as if she could leave them all behind.

Santi finds her in the church where they once got married. She knows it’s him as soon as the door creaks open. She doesn’t turn. She keeps staring ahead at the altar, at the hanging, expressionless Christ. In her peripheral vision, Santi pauses in the aisle to cross himself.

“I thought this was literally the last place you would look for me,” she says.

He slides into the pew next to her. “That’s why I came here first.”

Thora sighs. “Is Jules okay?”

He shakes his head.