The story
Avignon. A weekend in October.
Theo Crémieux is forty years old. He lives alone in a high-ceilinged apartment in Lyon and teaches philosophy at a private high school. He has booked three days in Provence because it has been raining over his life for too many years. He knows nothing about his own family.
Yael Toledano is twenty-nine. She was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic Haredi family and is finishing a doctorate on the Jewish community of the Comtat Venaissin. She is brilliant, and shomeret negiah: no man may touch her before marriage.
They meet in a disused mikvah, beneath a Beith Haknesset in the old Jewish quarter of Avignon. Yael finds a letter inside the wall. A letter five hundred and thirty-four years old, written by her own ancestor.
Someone saw them. And what the letter says was never meant to come back out of the stone.
“When you find this letter, you are already saved.”