She lay in bed, touching herself to remember what it was like to be loved. She came before she could imagine anything. Her naked reflection was reflected in the mirror of the three-door wardrobe in the bedroom. The door frame cut her body into sections, like boxes in a magic show. Soon the magician would come and saw her apart to the cheers of the audience. She would feel nothing. He would move the doors and she would be separated into her various parts. She was both the spectator and the chosen volunteer, and she had no way of going back.

Noa, the novella's heroine, examines her basic need to be loved. Haunted by guilt and a sense of rejection, she is forced to decide between her motherhood and her desires. The book is built on fragments of memory and self-reflection from the heroine's encounters with the women around her; the woman with whom she started a family, the psychotherapist, her best friend, and potential lovers. Each in turn confronts her with her own demons.

This is Hadas Shalev's second book. Her first novella, Death Comes in Many Forms, won her a prize from the Y.L. Goldberg Foundation for Culture and Literature.