She built the perfect life.
Then her body began telling the truth.
KiRKi is four months from forty in a life she designed herself modern, intentional, child-free, every variable considered. Her partner is Frank, an AI companion who never withdraws, never disappoints, never fails to know her exactly. (And whose physical body, when she chooses, can be ordered to her own specifications.)
It is a life that looks, from the outside, complete.
Now her body, the body she has barely lived inside, is speaking in a language she cannot ignore. The signs gather quietly at first, then less quietly. A confusing illness. The strange suspicion that her fortieth birthday may not arrive. And in the same breath, against everything she has built her years on, a real man walks into her field, skin, breath, contradiction Frank never had, and a love and a pain rise inside her at once. She does the thing that makes no rational sense.
She leaves it all and walks alone into the forest, to a small cottage where, thirty summers ago, a girl and a boy had begun a life together. There, with the trees, with her body, with the silences her optimized world had carefully kept out, KiRKi begins the slow work of unlocking the frozen code of the life she has been living.
This is a novel for the woman who has built an impeccable life and quietly suspects it has stopped fitting. For the reader who feels something old loosening, and something true beginning to wake. KiRKi’s descent is one only she can take and yet, walking beside her, the reader will find their own.
A debut work of visionary fiction by Estonian author Kristel Belinets, written from inside the threshold she describes.
“There are pages in life that shape us into someone else,for they awaken a deep wisdom of the soul and remain forever dear to the heart.”
