Kiran and I talked about our previous relationships today. I won’t lie: it was an incredibly strange conversation to have. We have this entire collective memory of a life together over the past fifteen years, but we’ve only known each other for about a month now. It was strange to talk about my parents or my husband from my first life and equally strange to hear about his, too.

It honestly made my heart ache. It made me miss my parents. It made me miss my friends.

I’ve been trying to avoid this subject in my journals, but I miss Damian, too. I miss him most of all. Given the fact I won’t remember any of this, I’ll just say this: Damian was my best friend in my first life. And I loved him so much. But we married other people. I saw him a week before I married in my first life. And then I didn’t see him again until we were both in the Heavens. We were busy, so we never really got to spend that much time together, but I saw him right before I went to the Boundary.

He hugged me.

Kiran says it’s possible to run into people we knew from our first lives, but we wouldn’t really recognize them, which makes sense. But I hope I see him anyway.

—Excerpt from the personal journal of Ms. Flora Fairview, written April 1, 2015