We walked in silence for a moment—or rather, as silent as it ever gets with Apple. The night air was cool against my fevered skin, a stark contrast to the confusion and curiosity burning beneath it. After saying goodbye to Apple at the crosswalk, I watched her head toward the sterile, secure women's dormitory where her parents, in their suffocating protectiveness, had insisted she live. A cage, they believed, would keep their daughter safe from the dangers of the world.

  My own "parents"—a kind, distant couple who were the great-great-grandchildren of people I had once known in a different life, in a different century—had simply signed the lease for my private apartment without a fuss. They saw me as fiercely independent, a young woman who knew her own mind and needed no supervision. They had no idea I was simply practiced. I had lived a hundred variations of this life, worn a hundred different faces, adapted to a hundred different family structures. This was just another iteration.

  Sometimes, I wondered at the irony. Apple's parents locked her in a gilded cage, oblivious to the wild, weekend-party animal she became the moment she was out of their sight. They thought they were protecting her from the world, but they had no idea that the world had already found her, that she navigated it with a skill they would never understand.

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  The world had changed, indeed. I was a living archive of its follies, a silent witness to every shifting moral and social tide. I had watched customs rise and fall, watched values transform and mutate, watched humanity cycle through the same mistakes with the cheerful optimism of those who believed their generation would somehow be different.

  But tonight, the world felt different. Tonight, something had shifted.

  I walked home alone, my footsteps echoing on the empty pavement. The city hummed around me—distant traffic, the occasional siren, the murmur of late-night revellers making their way between bars and clubs—but I moved through it like a ghost, my mind still trapped in that single, frozen moment when his eyes had met mine across the café.

  The other versions—the ones I had found and lost across so many lifetimes—they had all carried fragments of him. A tilt of the head here, a curve of the lips there. Echoes of his kindness, shadows of his strength. I had learned to love those fragments, to piece them together like a mosaic, to find comfort in the small ways his soul leaked through whatever mortal mask he wore.

  How many times had I done this? How many lifetimes had I watched him approach, drawn by that invisible thread tied to our souls, only to let him slip through my fingers? Too many to count. The numbers had blurred together centuries ago, each loss bleeding into the next until the only thing I could clearly remember was the shape of the wound they left behind.

  Always the same pattern: find him, love him, lose him, grieve him, repeat.