Chapter One
An Answer Without a Question
The answer began before anybody had asked a question.
Liora Nemm let herself into the old picture house and heard the projector turning in the dark. There were no appointments until the afternoon. Teo was supposed to be at the market buying the small bulbs that went inside the aisle lamps. She had his note in her coat pocket, written in the cramped capitals he used when he wanted to be understood at a glance.
She thought at first that he had left a reel running by accident. Then the screen showed a kitchen table with one leg shorter than the others, a folded cloth wedged beneath it, and a child pressing two fingers to the rim of a blue cup. Liora had known that table. She had been the child.
She stopped in the aisle. The projected picture was made from the room's usual layers of ink and light. It had no power to travel backward through time. The child's face was suggested by three careful cuts in a dark shape. Yet the cup was precisely right. Her mother had kept it after its handle broke and used it to hold the ends of pencils. The table had rocked until Liora's brother learned to fold the cloth thick enough. She could feel the old wobble through her feet.
At the back of the pictured kitchen stood an open door. Beyond it waited a bright strip of road and a woman carrying a case. The woman did not turn. When the reel ended, the road vanished and the real room filled with the soft, disappointed noise of a machine still turning.
