The snowfall had intensified. In the last remnants of the abating wind, the fat flakes were swarming the streetlights like moths. Art and Monica stood on the sidewalk while the tram rumbled away from the stop. Its noise was soon swallowed by the cottony landscape.

Monica hadn't put up her hood, and the flakes alighted on her long, black hair. They sat there for some seconds, then they melted—like shooting stars enjoying their brief moment of fame. The only stars of permanence were the flickers in her eyes as they studied him.

"Are you up to this?" Her smile fed the dimples in her cheeks.

"The question game? Sure." What could be hard about asking each other a question?

"But you know the rules, don't you?" She started strolling along the sidewalk, towards the intersection with Dumstreet.

"Tell me about them." Something in her smile that was almost a grin made him distrust her. "Once I know the rules, I'll decide if I join the game."

"Aha, you're having second thoughts, I see." She traced a hand along a chest-high wall separating a garden from the sidewalk. Her fingers plowed through the snow that had accumulated on top of it. "The rules are simple. The question must be answered truthfully and... fully. The answer must include all important facts."

"And what happens if someone fails to obey the rules?"

She stopped, clawed a fist-load of snow, and kneaded it into a ball. "The perpetrator gets snowballed." She made the snowball hop from her right hand to her left, and back, and forth, her slitted eyes trained on Art.

He wondered how she managed not to drop the thing. Then he dug his hand into another section of the snow topping the wall.

The stuff was cold.

He retrieved a handful and formed it into a weapon of his own.

"And how will you know if an answer was not truthful or incomplete?" He felt a grin on his face.

"I'll just know, believe me."

"Fine, I'll know a lie, too."

She tilted her head. "Are you sure? I'm a woman, I can sniff a lie. You're not."

He shrugged. "I'm a mathematician. I have an eye for broken symmetries and broken truths." He hoped the waitress would not be overawed by him being a mathematician.

"Okay. If you say so." Her tone lacked any trace of awe.

They reached the intersection and turned into Dumstreet.

"You first," Art said. "Ask your question."

"Okay. But I warn you, I'm a good shot." She swung her arm and threw the snowball. It hit a No Parking sign across the street with a loud bang.

"You don't intimidate me." He swung his own arm, aiming for the sign, threw—and missed.

She laughed. "I see. Okay, here's my question... You're an American. Why did you come to live in Tavetia?"

An easy one.

"I was offered a good job at the Tavetian Institute of Technology. The math institute here is world-class, and the work is right up my favorite alley... four-dimensional symmetries. It was an offer too good to decline."

"That's it?" She studied his face, a waterfall of wet hair covering one of her eyes.

"Yeah."

They were passing a car parked next to the curb. In a swift motion, Monica dug both her forearms into the snow on its roof, shoveling up a substantial amount of the white mass, turned, and propelled it into Art's face.

"Hey!" He stepped back and held up his arms in a belated, defensive gesture. His face was wet, and the cold stuff had already made its way into his collar. He shook himself.

She stood before him, arms akimbo. "That wasn't the whole truth. Not the important part of it."

"Why? It was."

"Look, man. You're what... forty maybe? That's not the time to move to another continent to start a new life, just like that... even if the job's a good one."

Her breath formed an orange-gray cloud in the artificial light.

She's literally fuming. Or at least her breath is.

"The answer must include all important facts." She scowled, then she smiled again. "The pertinent ones."

Pertinent...

Art wondered if all waitresses in this country talked like her.

A cold trickle of liquefied snow-wrath had reached his chest and continued towards his nether regions. The message it left was clear—he hadn't told the whole truth, and he knew it.

"Well... I'm waiting." A faint smile found its way back into her face. "And I warn you, there's more snow where that first batch came from."

Art rubbed his belly, trying to stop the trickle, but he merely managed to spread the cold. He shrugged. "Alright, there's more." He turned and began walking down Dumstreet.

She fell into step beside him.

"I had a divorce, in spring." His separation from Jane was definitely part of the reason he had left the States, but saying it aloud was difficult. It lacked glory, adventure, and cool. "After that, my life back home... it didn't feel right anymore. It was so odd to be with our common friends, without her by my side. It felt wrong to walk the streets of the city that held memories of... us. And I always was afraid to run into her... she still was working at the same university." He stopped, wondering what Monica would say.

She shuffled her boots through the snow, kicking up young snow gremlins. "I see. Splitting up sucks. Do you have kids?"

"No. Fortunately not. But that was a second question. It's my turn now."

"Fine. Shoot away." She continued her shuffling.

He had wanted to ask her about her father, why she had mentioned him with such a bitter undertone, back in the tram. But now he wasn't sure about that anymore. He also wanted to know how she knew that splitting up sucks, but that felt cheap, like mirroring her question back to her. He could also ask her if she had killed Knooch—but he didn't think she had done it, and if she had, she wouldn't tell him, whatever the rules of this game were. And, finally, he was curious about the many messages on her phone, but that was such a random detail and such a nosy question.

He opted for the father.

"So... what is it about your father, the thing that triggered you to lash your tongue at Savage?"

Monica brushed snow from her hair and put up her hood. "My father is a lawyer. A good one, or so they say. He's a partner and a founding member of one of the large and reputed firms in this city... specializing in business law. That's where the big money is. He's successful, rich, and demanding. Mother always did his bidding... she's a linguist, but she stopped working when she married dad and had me, my brother, and my sister. It was always clear that all of us kids would study too... and that we'd have careers of our own. We were... encouraged to be among the best." She grabbed a fistful of snow from the roof of another car, made a ball and threw it along the deserted pavement.

"And you didn't oblige..."

"Nope, I didn't. Didn't want to live up to his expectations... to be one of his minions. Anyway, when I was studying medicine, I met a guy from Chile... a wild one." A brief smile touched her face. "I dropped out of university. My father had fits. But I was old enough by then to do what I wanted. I moved out... we went to live in Paraguay, then Chile. It felt so good to be free from... the shackles I had worn all my life... the condescending connivance... the patronizing... the expectation to excel."

"And that wild Chilean you ran away with, where is he now?"

Have you split up, too?

"He's..." She stopped, then wagged a finger at him. "One question only. He has nothing to do with my father."

"Okay, fair enough." He nodded, admitting her point. "So... what about your father? Is he still alive... are you still in touch?"

"He's still alive." She slowed down and studied the window pattern of Dumstreet 9 as if assessing its symmetries. "He's even spending lots of time at the firm, although he's seventy. I see him, sometimes, mostly for my mother's sake. At Christmas, or birthdays. We keep a polite distance, anything else doesn't work. He's such a headstrong and irascible character."

That seems to run in the family, Art thought, but he refrained from saying it aloud. She looked so vulnerable under the protective layer of her thick coat.

A winterlocked, wild waif. 

"And?" She glanced at him from the abyss of her hood. "You haven't thrown any snow at me. Do you think you've got the complete truth now? Hasn't your mathematical mastermind detected any flaws or gaps in my tale?" She grinned, teeth gleaming almost as white as the snow.

No, his mastermind had failed to give him clues to something missing, nor did it offer him a smart answer to her tease. Yet he still grabbed a handful of snow from a stout, eiderdowned stone pillar guarding the porch, formed it into a ball, and weighed it in his hand. "It's complete enough, for the time being."

"Phew... I was afraid you'd want to know what happened after my dad had called me a lazy slut when I was leaving our happy family home... to move abroad with my new boyfriend. After I slammed the door in his face, I was standing in front of the house, seeing his new, shiny Mercedes parked in the driveway. I held the door keys in my hand, planning to leave them in the letterbox..."

"I have a vague idea," Art said, "of these keys accidentally making contact with a car's paint, leaving some scratches."

"Just one scratch. I'm not that bad a girl, you know." She fumbled in her coat and produced, fittingly, a bunch of keys, holding one of them up between them. "However, that scratch..." She moved the key from left to right, slowly. "... it went all the way from the headlights to the taillights. And, since we are sworn to the full truth here, I can't really contend the incident was accidental."

He could vividly imagine the scene, and her answer felt complete now. He still considered throwing the snowball at her chest—gently—just for the fun of it. But she turned, walked to the front door, and inserted the key into its lock.

A broom was leaning against the doorway, its silent message obvious. She ignored it and entered with her muddy shoes and snow-covered coat.