Chapter 1 (Lyrical) - Why 2+2=4?

The room was quiet in the way old rooms get when they have decided to stop pretending. A wooden clock on the dresser kept its small, stubborn tick. The sound was thin but it was constant, like a thread you could hold. At the window, the curtains breathed. Wind entered in careful sips, lifting the fabric a finger-width, letting it fall again. Sunlight lay in long, pale bars across the bedspread, then softened as a cloud passed and the bars dissolved. Emma stood at the foot of the bed with her coat still on. She had not chosen to keep it. It had remained on her shoulders the way a shield remains on a soldier who has forgotten how to take it off. Her grandmother watched her with a steady, exhausted focus, eyes bright in a face that had gone slack around the mouth. The old woman’s hands were on top of the blanket, veins raised, fingers slightly curled as if she had been holding something small for too long. Emma’s gaze stayed just to the side of her grandmother’s eyes. Window frame. Curtain hem. The corner of the mattress. Safe edges. Her breathing was shallow and high, as if her chest had become a narrow room too. “Emma, I am dying.” The sentence did not rise. It settled. It landed in the bed between them and did not move. Emma’s throat tightened. She nodded once, a gesture that could mean anything and therefore meant nothing. The clock ticked as if it had not heard. She found her voice anyway, clean and procedural, the kind of voice you use with pharmacists and receptionists. “Do you want your medicine?” Her grandmother’s eyes flickered toward the bedside table. A bottle stood there, cap on, a glass of water beside it, a halo of dust on the lacquered wood where other cups had been set down, lifted, set down again. “No. I don’t need the medicine anymore.” The wind paused. The curtains held their breath against the glass. A cloud slid in front of the sun and the room dimmed by one quiet degree. Emma’s fingers, which had been hanging at her sides, curled against the seams of her coat. She pressed her thumbnail into the fabric until she could feel the sting through the wool. It was a small proof that she was still here. Her grandmother’s voice was not loud. It was careful, as if every syllable had a price. She looked at Emma’s face, then at her mouth, as if watching for the moment the muscles would break. “A long time ago your parents died. You were strong. You got through it.” Emma did not answer. Her jaw quivered once, then stilled. The words hit a place behind her ribs where she kept old scenes folded. She could feel the pressure of them, like papers in a drawer that no longer closes. Her grandmother kept going, because stopping felt like losing. “When you were little, you followed your mother around the house asking why about everything. 'Why is two plus two equal to four, mom?'” For Emma, that old question had never been about arithmetic. Numbers were the only adults in her childhood who did not change their faces. Two plus two did not get tired. Four did not walk away. There was a clean door in the mind that opened when a statement stayed true no matter who was watching. In the years after, when people became unpredictable, she learned to step through that door. If you could prove something, you could hold it. If you could hold it, it could not leave. The clock ticked. The curtains shifted. Light moved across the blanket as if the room itself were trying to remember that child, the one who followed, the one who asked. Emma’s eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in effort. She saw it, unwillingly: small feet on tile, a woman’s skirt swaying ahead, the plea of a question that was not really about numbers. Her grandmother’s voice dipped, became more intimate, more dangerous. “Your mother didn’t look at you. 'I’m tired,' she said—and she walked away.” The sentence left a cold residue. It made the air feel heavier, as if grief had a density. Emma’s shoulders rose a fraction. She swallowed without sound. She did not turn her head. She did not look at the bed. “I’m fine. I’ve learned to be alone.” She said it as if reading a label. She said it as if it were a concluded theorem: proved, sealed, filed away. For a moment there was nothing but the clock, the faint creak of the house settling, the curtain’s small movements. The world continued, obedient to physics, indifferent to what was being asked of it. Her grandmother’s eyes softened, then sharpened. She understood the shape of Emma’s sentence. It was not a declaration. It was a door closing. If she did not put her hand in the hinge right now, the door would shut forever. The old woman’s fingers tried to open on the blanket. They did not fully obey. Her breath came in a thin, careful pull. “Promise me you will do what you love.” Emma’s face stayed still. A muscle near her cheek twitched, the smallest refusal. Her grandmother waited, patience and fear braided together. The clock kept counting. Emma lowered her chin. Her voice came out quieter, controlled to the point of being almost gentle. “I promise.” It was the kind of promise you give when you want the conversation to end and you can’t think of a better exit. Her grandmother’s mouth trembled. She could feel the distance in the words. She could hear the emptiness around them. “And promise me too that you’ll let yourself be loved.” The words were a kind of equation her body refused to balance. Loved meant seen. Seen meant held. Held meant that someone could tighten their grip or let go. Her nervous system treated both possibilities as danger. So she had built a life where everything important was made of things that did not have hands: ideas, systems, schedules, clean obligations. Love was a variable that made the whole proof unstable. Emma’s eyes flashed to her grandmother’s face and away again. It was not contempt. It was an animal reaction, a flinch from warmth. In the small pause that followed, something in her grandmother’s expression shifted. It was an old recognition: the moment you see the cliff edge and understand there is no more room for careful steps. Emma was almost gone behind her own walls. If she wanted to leave anything in her granddaughter’s hands that was more than advice, it had to be now. Her grandmother’s gaze drifted to the dresser. On its surface, near the ticking clock, lay a necklace: a thin chain, darkened with age, a small pendant that caught what little light the room still offered. “This necklace was my mother’s. She gave it to me before she died. I want you to wear it now.” The request was simple. It also weighed a ton. Emma hesitated as if deciding whether to pick up a hot pan. Then she stepped closer, because stepping closer was easier than refusing out loud. The closer she came, the stronger the smell of ointment and soap and old linen became. It was a scent with no narrative, just fact. Her grandmother lifted the chain with hands that shook. The metal made a faint sound, like a small bell muffled by time. Emma turned, stiffly, offering her nape. The gesture was competent. It was also surrender. The chain touched her skin. Cold first, then warming as it settled. Her grandmother’s fingers searched for the clasp with slow insistence, as if the whole universe had narrowed to that tiny mechanism. The clock ticked. The curtains barely moved. The light stayed flat and muted, the color drained as if the room had decided not to influence the outcome. Emma held her breath, not because she chose to, but because her body did it for her. She kept her eyes on the window frame again, the clean geometry of it, the way right angles made sense without asking anything back. Her grandmother’s breath rasped once. Her fingers fumbled, then found the clasp. There was a small click, decisive, final. She felt, absurdly, the geometry of it. A chain was a line that admitted it could not stay straight. It bent and returned to itself. The clasp made a closed shape, like a conclusion. In her mind, conclusions were safe. They were the moment the wandering stopped and the result arrived: this implies that, therefore this. But a closed shape around the throat was also a kind of claim, and Emma did not like claims. For half a second, Emma felt the chain close around her like a boundary. A circle. Something that could be held. Her grandmother’s hand did not fall away. It hovered near Emma’s neck as if wanting to rest there, as if wanting to be seen. The old woman searched Emma’s face for a reaction she could carry with her. She found professionalism. She found stillness. She found a wall. Doubt landed behind her eyes. It was quiet. It was heavy. Her grandmother’s chest rose once more. Then it did not rise again. At first it looked like a pause, like the small breaks she had taken all morning between breaths. Then the pause lengthened. It became a different kind of stillness, a stillness with no intention inside it. The clock continued to tick. The curtains hung almost motionless. The light did not return. The room held, suspended. Emma did not move. Her hands were clamped into the cushion of the chair beside the bed, knuckles whitening as if she could anchor herself by force. Her shoulders were locked. Her jaw trembled and then froze. She kept her gaze on the window frame, as if the rectangle could keep her from looking at what had changed. In her chest, pressure rose like water behind a dam. She did not let it spill. She did not let anything spill. A soft sound came from her throat that did not become a sob. She swallowed it back down as if swallowing glass. Her right hand lifted to the necklace. Two fingers found the pendant and pinched it hard, precise, enough to hurt. The pain was a tiny flare of reality she could use. She drew in a controlled breath. It filled only the upper part of her lungs. She held it too long. Her eyes stung but did not weep. Then she released the air through her nose in a thin exhale, almost silent, as if even oxygen had to obey her rules. In the next moment, wind pushed into the room with more confidence. The curtains lifted and fell in a broader motion, no longer cautious. A slice of sun slid out from behind the cloud and laid itself across the bed, bright enough to show the texture of the blanket and the stillness of the body beneath it. The clock’s ticking, which had been distant, became audible again, as if sound itself had stepped closer. Emma stood up, squared herself, and became a gate between the window and the bed. Her face reset into neutrality. Her eyes went dry. Her hands dropped from the necklace. Inside, behind the sternum and along the jaw, the pressure stayed. She looked at the room as if it were a problem to solve. She did not look at her grandmother’s eyes. The chain rested against her skin, cool and inexorable, a small weight that did not care whether she believed in it. Outside the window, the city continued. Somewhere, a dog barked once and stopped. The wind moved on to the next building, the next curtain, the next room. Emma stood in the bright bar of sun and let the clock keep counting for her.