Summary

One day Guylain happened to find a small red USB stick on the train. He placed it in his pocket and wondered all day what it contained. When he opened its contents on his laptop that evening, he was surprised to find a woman’s journal. He clicked on the first document and read, his excitement mounting. It was written in first person, and the writer described her spring ritual of counting the terracotta tiles in the bathroom where she worked as an attendant. Her voice was endearing; she noted her particular fondness for the broken tiles, those that no longer held their shine like their fellows. At the end, she always reached a total of 14,717 tiles, a number she considered ugly and stark. This was only the first of 72 entries, all of which Guylain devoured hungrily late into the night. When he...