Marc

His name is Marc Bosch, and he is a good man.

Valentina has known this since the first life, and she knows it now — at twenty-one, standing in the entryway of Clàudia's housewarming party in a Sant Gervasi (an affluent residential neighborhood in the upper part of Barcelona, quieter and more residential than the city center) apartment that smells of new paint and someone's attempt at homemade croquetes (fried croquettes, a classic Spanish tapa made with béchamel sauce and usually filled with jamón — cured ham — or bacallà — salt cod), watching him navigate a room with the ease of someone comfortable anywhere and threatening to no one.

She knows something else about Marc Bosch: in her first life, she was with him for four years. Stable, uncomplicated years. Good years, in the way that years without incident are good, which is to say: fine, and ultimately not enough.

She does not intend to date Marc Bosch in the second life.

She also did not intend to be standing near the kitchen when he came to refill his drink and says, with a straightforward friendliness that she remembers being one of his best qualities: "You're Valentina. Clàudia talks about you constantly."

"She talks about everyone constantly," Valentina says. "It's her superpower."

He laughs. Easy, unguarded. "True. I'm Marc. We were in secondary school together."

"I know. You did the school play in tercero (third year of secondary school, equivalent to tenth grade in the American system, typically for fifteen to sixteen year olds) and forgot every line in the second act."

He stares at her. "How do you know that?"

"Clàudia," Valentina says simply.

"Of course." He shakes his head, but he's smiling. "To be fair, the second act was terrible. The whole play was terrible. We were sixteen."

"Most things are terrible at sixteen," Valentina says. "That's what sixteen is for."

They talk for twenty minutes — about Clàudia, about the neighborhood, about the fact that Marc is finishing a master's in architecture and has opinions about the new construction going up along the waterfront that are specific and passionate and not wrong. He is easy to talk to. He has always been easy to talk to. That was the first thing that drew her to him, in the first life, at a party not unlike this one.

She is aware, with the doubled vision that is her permanent condition, of exactly how this story goes if she lets it. The first easy conversation. The second. The slow drift into couplehood that neither of them fully decided, just found themselves in one day. The four years that were good in the way that things without edges are good — smooth, and safe, and in the end not the shape of the life she wanted.

She is not going to let it.

Not out of cruelty — Marc Bosch doesn't deserve cruelty, not even the passive kind. But she has a phone with a message that says Neither am I and a November that is six weeks away and a life she is building along a very specific axis, and she is done making choices that trade the life she wants for the life that's available.

She tells Clàudia on the way home.

"Marc is great," she says. "He's genuinely great. Don't let him disappear."

Clàudia looks at her with the alert attention of someone who has just received a non-obvious amount of information. "Okay."

"I mean it. He's the kind of person who's easy to overlook because he doesn't need to be noticed. Those people are worth keeping."

"I'll keep him," Clàudia says. A pause. "Are you not going to—"

"No."

"Okay." Clàudia asks nothing further, which is one of the reasons Valentina values her above almost everyone in this life. "Is this about the American?"

Valentina looks at the street ahead. The Sant Gervasi sidewalk under the old plane trees, the city spread below them, October already tightening the air.

"It's about me," she says. "Mostly."

"Mostly," Clàudia repeats, with the tone of a woman who is satisfied with this answer.

They walk the rest of the way to the metro in comfortable silence — the kind you only have with people you don't need to perform for — and Valentina thinks about the first life's four years with Marc, which were not wasted years, exactly, but were years in which she made herself smaller to fit something that was never going to grow.

She thinks about the message on her phone.

She thinks about November.

She is not making herself smaller again.

Not for anyone. Not anymore.