“But one thing I think is true. Your relationship with Jules is built on knowledge that you have and she doesn’t. That’s not fair. And I think you know it.”

Thora looks away. There’s an emptiness opening up inside her, a loneliness she can’t bear. “I just want to be with her,” she says miserably.

“Then be with her,” Santi says. “But you have to be honest. With her, as well as with yourself.”

He stands. Thora looks at his offered hand as if it’s a choice. But it isn’t, not really. She has been living her life with Jules inside a glass box. Now, she has to break them out of it, see if they can make something of the shards.

“I do want to know why,” she says. “You think I’ve stopped asking, but that’s not what it is. Just—catch me again when I have less to lose.”

Santi gives her a serious look. “I will.”

She takes his hand and lets him pull her to her feet. “Maybe we’re both just crazy,” she remarks as they walk down the aisle under the dark stained glass. “Locked away in a little room somewhere, dreaming of other lives.”

They walk out into the summer night, through the old town back toward Ehrenfeld. Thora tilts her head up as they cross the park. The brilliance of the stars looks false, lights on a too-close ceiling. “I remember how scared I was,” she says to Santi. “The first time I realized they’d changed.”

He follows her gaze upward. “What scares me isn’t that they changed,” he says. “What scares me is that they stopped changing.”

“What?” Thora squints, trying to match the scattered lights to the myriad star maps in her memory. “Since when?”

“They’ve been the same for lifetimes now.”

She looks at him, trying to figure out if he’s playing a trick on her. But she knows the Santi of this life. He wouldn’t joke, not about this.

“I guess I stopped looking,” she says.

His silence is enough of an answer.

Thora sighs. “Tell me, then. What does it mean?”

Santi shrugs. “Everything.”

She snorts. “That’s such a typical thing for you to say. And having known a lot of you, I can speak with authority.” She blinks, and the stars disappear. Then they’re back, steady and waiting. “Why do you think we never made it up there?”

Santi looks from the stars to her with a fond smile. “There’s no never,” he says. “Not for us.”

Thora shudders at it: a horror and a comfort, that this isn’t their last chance. She laughs, a strange hilarity overtaking her.

“What?”