Chapter 1

It was on one of those listless afternoons that she found herself at the kiosk on the edge of the town square. The kiosk was a wooden box painted a faded green, its window grimy with the fingerprints of all the hands that had reached for newspapers and sweets and the occasional lottery ticket. The awning, striped in red and white, sagged under the sun’s glare, offering only a sliver of shade. She had intended to buy bread—her mother had asked for a loaf from the bakery across the square, the one with the cracked sign and the smell of yeast that leaked through its door—but that errand could wait. Her feet carried her to the magazine rack, a wire spindle that creaked when she turned it, as if it had not been touched in weeks.

And there it was: the cover of Moteris, the June issue. The woman on the front wore a dress printed with bold yellow sunflowers, her hair cascading in waves that seemed to move even in the stilled air of the kiosk. Her lips were painted a shade of coral that had no name in Klisto, a color that belonged to city windows and glossy advertisements. Her eyes—dark and knowing—looked out with a confidence that made the afternoon feel suddenly insufficient, as if she, the woman in the magazine, knew something about the world that no one in this town had ever whispered. The headline, in a curled typeface, promised "The Summer of Change: How Three Women Rewrote Their Lives." She bought the magazine with coins from the bottom of her purse, the bread forgotten, the transaction completed with a grunt from the kiosk attendant who never looked up from his crossword.

She walked home along the path that skirted the apple orchard, the magazine pressed against her ribs. The paper was slick and cool, a foreign object in her hands, and she could feel its weight in grams but also in something else—a kind of gravitational pull toward a future she had never considered. The gravel crunched under her sandals, and the orchard’s green fragrance, bruised and sweet, mingled with the scent of fresh ink. A bee hummed past her ear, drunk on the linden blossoms, and she slowed her steps, letting the quiet settle around her. In the distance, a tractor coughed and died, then started again. She felt a flutter in her chest, a stirring she could not name, like the first tremor before rain.

Her home was a two-room flat on the third floor of a concrete block building, one of a dozen identical structures that faced each other across a dusty courtyard. The walls were thin enough that she could hear Mr. Petraitis’s television through the plaster, always tuned to the same channel, always the same static-tinted dramas with their overwrought emotions. She sat on the sofa, the springs groaning under her weight, and opened the magazine. The pages were glossy, smelling of ambition and the chemical sheen of possibility. She did not read so much as absorb the images—the advertisements for lipsticks that promised transformation, the photographs of women in skirts that seemed to defy gravity, the articles that spoke of careers and self-fulfillment as if these were ordinary things, as ordinary as a loaf of bread or a cup of tea.

One article, "The Summer of Change," caught her eye. It profiled a woman named Rasa who had left her small town to study in Vilnius. The photograph showed her standing in front of the university, her expression determined, her hands gripping a satchel. The caption read: "Rasa always knew there was more." She read the article twice, then set the magazine on her lap and stared at the dust motes drifting in the afternoon light that bled through the window. She thought of her own life—the same kitchen table with its faded oilcloth, the same chipped cups, the same conversations about the weather and the neighbor’s rheumatism, the same silence when her mother folded laundry and her father lit a cigarette. Expectations had never been spoken aloud, but they were there, lodged in the walls, in the way her mother’s voice softened when she said "when you marry," in the unspoken assumption that a woman’s future was a small, contained thing, like a garden plot that had already been measured.

The magazine's pages offered a different script. The cover girl’s smile seemed to ask a question she had never allowed herself to form: What if the story you were given is not the only story?

That evening, she sat on the balcony, the magazine open on her lap. The balcony was a narrow ledge with a rusted railing, just wide enough for a plastic chair and a pot of basil that had gone to seed. The sun dipped behind the rooftops, painting the sky in shades of apricot and rose, and the cicadas began their nightly chorus, a sawing sound that rose and fell like breath. She traced the outline of a yellow sunflower on the cover with her finger, feeling the slick texture of the paper, the subtle ridges of the printing. The world continued as always—a dog barked somewhere, a child laughed, a door slammed. But inside her, something had cracked, a thin line through the certainty she had carried all her life, like the fault line in a teacup that had been dropped and glued back together. She had no words for it yet. It was not rebellion, not ambition, but a quiet ache for something more, a sense that the life she was living was only one version, and not the fullest one.

She went to bed and left the magazine on the nightstand, face up. The cover girl’s eyes caught the glow of the streetlamp through the thin curtain, and she seemed to watch as she undressed, as she folded her clothes, as she slid between the sheets. She fell asleep with the echo of that question still hanging in the air, like the scent of rain before it arrives: What if?

The next morning, rain came. It was the first in weeks, tapping against the window like a gentle insistence, a rhythm that matched her heartbeat. She woke to the sound, a soft percussion that filled the flat with a cool gray light. She reached for the magazine and opened it again to the article about Rasa. She read it three times, then put it down and watched the rain turn the courtyard into a pool of reflections, the puddles shimmering with the colors of the sky. She thought about Rasa’s hands gripping the satchel, about the courage it must have taken to leave everything behind—the familiar streets, the voices of family, the weight of expectation. She thought about her own hands, which had never held anything heavier than a grocery bag, which had never reached for something beyond the reach of her arm. The quiet of her days had been filled with the noise of possibility, and the noise was deafening.

By the time the rain stopped, she had made a decision. It was not grand or spoken aloud. It was a private vow, thin and fragile as the first thread of a spider’s web: she would keep the magazine. Not hide it in a drawer, not forget it on a shelf, not use it to line the cupboard. She would place it where she could see it every morning, as a reminder that another world existed, that other women had walked paths she could not yet see. And maybe, slowly, she would find her own path, hidden in the undergrowth of her own life.

That afternoon, she set the magazine on the kitchen windowsill. The light caught the cover, and the yellow sunflowers seemed to glow, a small sun in the gray room. It became a quiet presence, a splash of color in a space that had always felt muted, like a voice that had been held too long in the throat. Each day, the cover girl’s smile said something different—a greeting in the morning, a challenge at noon, a promise in the dusk. She did not know yet what she would do with that promise. She only knew that it was there, and that she was listening.

Summer of '94. The summer of rain and magazine pages. The summer when a hairline crack in her certainty became a window, one that she could peer through even if she could not yet climb out. She did not yet know what would come next, but she felt it, like the warmth of the sun after the storm, like the first cool breath of evening after a day of heat. Something was beginning. And she was ready.