“We were sitting side by side, exhausted from a verbose touch of our shoulders,” Elvira writes in her diary about Maximos, her husband.

The central heroine, under the looming threat of a mental illness, redefines her freedom, trying to break free from the shackles of fear. She loves but seeks to fall in love, protects but chooses to sacrifice. Elvira has a famous marriage, a forbidden love, an award-winning artistic career, and a deeply traumatic experience with her daughter.

A new couple, Loukia and Dimitris, feel envy and love for her respectively, intertwining their paths with hers. Meanwhile, her daughter, Ella, develops an elective affinity with a distinguished mathematician, Razan, whom her mother had helped in the past as an unaccompanied refugee who arrived in Greece.

The heroes are revealed through a spiraling narrative thread, a back-and-forth in time. We learn about them in segments, their voices rising in intensity and shedding light on their truth more with each chapter. And while their characters are progressively built, the central heroine follows an opposite trajectory, seeming to deconstruct before us.

As she seeks to enact the desire for her freedom, we wonder, who is she really? What is she made of?

Confirming Razan's words: “Every time, with every division, a superfluous multiple leaves you. In the end, you are left, the prime number. The indivisible, magnificent, tough core of yourself.”