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asked.
    I admitted I didn’t.
    “This isn’t me.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “You stood there admiring this face, but you weren’t admiring
me
. You were acting just like all the rest of them.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I’ve been a woman,” she said. “I know how it goes. A man tells a woman, ‘You’re very beautiful,’ and she’s supposed to feel like he’s saying something about
her
, as though that beauty runs clear through her. But if you tell me
I’m
beautiful, you’re just talking about some bones and skin and hair that don’t even belong to me. It’s like you take it for granted that
I’ll
feel complimented if you stand there admiring some
other
woman’s face.”
    “I understand. If someone says Mallory’s beautiful, this has nothing to do with you. You don’t own that face.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But you
do
own it, you know. It’s yours now, for the rest of your life. You might as well get used to accepting the compliment, to saying, ‘Yes, you’re right, I
am
beautiful.’ ”
    She gave her head a little shake. “You can’t know that. Maybe next week I’ll be gone just the way Mallory’s gone.”
    “No,” I said on my way to a chair, “that’s no more likely to happen to you than it is to me.”
    “But it
did
happen.”
    I sat down and crossed my legs, making myself at home. “It did happen—once—virtually a miracle, something that happens once every billion man-years.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “If there are a billion people on the earth, we experience a billion man-years of human life every year. And that’s about how often this happens—and why it’s hardly likely to happen twice to the same person.”
    “All right, I can see that.” She paused, momentarily lost in thought, and I had a glimpse of the calm intensity that would come to her naturally when the present turmoil and confusion subsided. “But tell me this,” she said at last. “Where did Mallory go? I’ve got to know that, because I feel like a murderer. Where is Mallory?”
    I lifted a finger and pointed it straight at her. “There is Mallory.”

“I’M GOING TO
explain
the theory,” I went on, “because theory is all we have. What’s happened to you has happened before, hundreds of times at least. I, personally, have met half a dozen people it’s happened to, and this is how we explain it until we have a better way. Every human is animated by a soul, which departs the body at death and subsequently migrates to another body, which it animates at conception or sometime soon after. In this new incarnation, the soul has no recollection of its previous incarnation—or of any of its previous incarnations. At least not ordinarily. But once in a very great while someone will spontaneously begin to recollect details of a previous incarnation—name, family, place of residence, and so on. Most often, memories of the person’s past incarnation exist side by side with those of the present incarnation.
    But sometimes, even more rarely, memories of the past incarnation overwhelm those of the present incarnation—supplant them, blot them out. And of course that’s what’s happened in your case. You haven’t
murdered
Mallory, you’ve just lost all memory of
being
Mallory.”
    Looking stunned, she shook her head. “You mean I was born into this body. Despite everything my memory tells me, you’re saying I have as much business being here as Mallory did.”
    “That’s right. The break is in your memories, not in the person you experience as yourself.”
    “That’s bullshit,” she said. “Excuse me, but it is. The person I experience as myself is exactly what’s broken.”
    She had a point, which I had to acknowledge. “Try it this way,” I said. “Many people experience amnesia for one reason or another, usually as a result of a head injury. I assume you know that.”
    “I guess so. Go ahead.”
    “And what usually happens in these cases is that they remember nothing of