She doesn’t notice that she’s staring sightlessly at her computer, the brief untouched, until there’s a terse knock on her office door.

“Are you planning to wait up for Gabe?” Ezra’s face could have been carved out of stone.

“I can.” Rivi can’t be up too late when she has to catch a train in the morning, but she doesn’t dare ask anything of Ezra right now. “Though he is an adult. He doesn’t really need someone to leave the light on for him.”

“If you don’t want to stay up, I can.” A flash of irritation. “You don’t need to play the martyr all the time.”

This is hardly a conversation, but it’s already going downhill. “I’m not playing the martyr. I’m perfectly capable of knowing my own limits.” They stare at each other, Ezra’s face hard and Rivi’s sharp, and it feels nearly inevitable when her phone begins to blare.

It’s lying on her desk, easily visible to both of them, and Rivi sees the name on the screen with a sinking sensation. GARRETT BOYD.

“Go ahead,” Ezra says, and there is nothing defeated in the way he says it. It’s a gauntlet, a threat, vicious and angry. “Pick it up.”

Rivi stabs the Decline button with extra force. Ezra watches, arms folded, leaning against the doorway with his eyes dark and irritated. There’s so little of her husband in him right now, so little of the man she married, and she’s suddenly sure that this is her fault. That she has ruined him, transformed him into this resentful, adversarial person.

She’s also angry. This isn’t how it works. They don’t fight like this. They compromise and listen to each other and Ezra hasn’t been listening, not about Boyd or Rivi’s career or anything other than his image of what she should be.

“Do you think I had a choice?” she demands. “That I could turn Boyd down? I would have lost my job.” And that was the truth. It might not have happened right away, but eventually, the specter of a lost client that powerful would have marred her image irreparably.

“You didn’t take the case to keep your job,” Ezra scoffs. “You took it because you never know when to stop.” His foot taps a staccato beat against the metal band of the threshold. “I asked you not to take it. I knew it would be too much. I knew it would take over your life, and you just—”

“Fine.” It’s easy to spit out the truth now, to rise so they’re on even footing. “It wasn’t about keeping my job. It was about making partner. It was about the case. This was a dream job. Any lawyer would die to work for Garrett Boyd, don’t you get it? Do you know what his name can do in my world? What kind of connections this can lead me to? And he wanted me. Me!”

It had been a staggering compliment, a recognition unlike any she’d ever had. Rivi has always kept her ambitions in check. There’s only so far a frum mother can go in the courtroom. “This was a huge deal for me. This was once in a lifetime.”

“This is destroying you!” Ezra doesn’t budge, doesn’t back down, and Rivi can feel her heart racing, a flush of fury and panic shooting through her. “You didn’t need that opportunity. We were doing fine!” He gestures at the office, at the house behind him. “We’re comfortable. We didn’t need you to make partner or get some high-profile client.”

“I wanted it.” Suddenly, Rivi is so frustrated, teetering on the edge of a cliff. “Doesn’t that matter? I wanted this so badly.”

“We want things that aren’t good for us all the time.” Ezra’s eyes flash. “Sometimes we need people to step in and save us from ourselves.”

“Don’t patronize me!” Rivi says furiously, and her voice is too high, too close to cracking. “I’m not Shira, asking for a candy before bedtime. I’m an adult! I know my capacity—”

“You don’t! You push yourself to every limit, and then you suffer. And then everyone around you suffers! You’ve been so caught up with this case that everything else has fallen by the wayside. You’ve brought him into our house! You’re fielding calls from him all the time! And you’re so busy that you barely have time for… for our family, for our kids—”

It hits like a blow to her chest, so powerful that Rivi is left gasping for breath, her composure shattered. I’m trying! she wants to scream, but it feels false on her tongue, a twisted representation of the truth. “I know,” she forces out. “Okay? I know!”

She can’t be here right now. She needs out, out of this conversation, out of this house, out of everything that presses into her, forcing the breath out of her lungs, the moisture from her eyes. She blows forward in a movement so abrupt that Ezra doesn’t have the time to stop her; she throws the front door open and surges outside.

She isn’t going anywhere. There’s nowhere to go. Behind her is her home, the place that she’s carved for herself out of the ashes of her childhood, but now it looms like a menacing threat, like something that will destroy her. She is wearing slippers and doesn’t have her phone and she just needs to breathe, to take in shuddering breath after shuddering breath until, somehow, composure will find her again.

But it flits away, so high that she has no chance of grasping at it. All she can see is Ezra’s accusing face, his words drilling into her. For our kids….

She knows. It’s been eating away at her. She isn’t good with her children, isn’t enough for them, isn’t their favorite and never will be. What kind of mother can’t connect with her babies? What kind of mother prioritizes work over their emotional needs?

And she can deny it when she hears the accusations from other people, from snotty sisters-in-law and a judgy mother-in-law and people who don’t know anything about her, but Ezra has never said the words. Ezra has never made her feel like she’s failed the kids, and now her tears threaten to fall, to wash away the entire world in a tsunami.

She holds them at bay. It’s what she’s best at. She hadn’t cried when Abba died, when Gabe had left, when she had struggled in childhood because of a father who hadn’t been enough. (Like you, not enough, not enough.)

“Tough kid,” one of the neighbors had commented once. “Rivi? She’s like an obelisk.” It’s who she is, standing strong, keeping everything bottled up tightly. It’s who she’s always had to be. She will not break now.

Her stride quickens, her feet nearly sliding out of their fuzzy white slippers — now gray, she’s sure, tarnished by her decisions like everything else. She stumbles forward as she hears her name. “Rivi. Rivi.”

Ezra hasn’t let her go. He walks behind her, his face shadowed in the streetlight. Rivi stops, twists around, her whole body stretched tight like a balloon about to burst.

“Rivi,” he says again, and he sounds… angry, yes, but also just as lost as she feels. “What are you doing? What is this chip on your shoulder?” He curls his fingers into a fist, uncurls them. “I thought that it was about your father—”

“My father has nothing to do with this.” It’s automatic, the denial, the desperate desire to keep Abba’s dirty laundry far from her family.

“Then is it the fight with Suri?”

“I am so sick of Suri! Of all of them!” She can feel the flush of emotion, of frustrated despair, because she’s never going to fix that. A pretty vase isn’t going to change their relationship, is never going to make things easier for her, and now she’s standing on a street corner in her slippers railing at the only Greenberg who should be her ally. “I’m so tired of not being good enough—”

Ezra looks baffled. “For Suri and Atara?”

“For you!” The words tear themselves free from her throat, jagged and violent. Ezra gapes at her, his eyes wide and his face pale, and Rivi drops her head, stares at the ground, and wants to collapse right there in a puddle of agony.

When Ezra speaks again, it’s more measured, more gentle. It’s the Ezra she knows. He can never resist reaching out to someone in pain, being a helper, there to soothe her at her most desperate hour.

Rivi is a terrible match for him, determined not to expose any vulnerability, and she trembles as he murmurs, “Let’s go inside, okay? We can have this conversation without the neighbors watching.”

Rivi doesn’t answer, but she follows him back to the house, her head aching at the thought of continuing the conversation. She doesn’t want to talk about this, to feel exposed and humiliated, and she lingers in the foyer as Ezra shuts the door.

Her phone’s ringtone sounds from her office, and she jumps, eager for a distraction. Ezra says, “Absolutely not. Not right now.” He moves before she can, snatches the phone from the desk, and then frowns. “It’s Gabe.”

“Gabe?” It’s getting late, she realizes suddenly, much later than Gabe should have been out. Why is he calling her while on a date? What’s happened?

Ezra picks up the phone. “Everything okay?” He listens for a moment, the color draining out of his face, and his fingers loosen against the sides of the phone. Rivi watches him, tense and confused. “We’ll be right there,” he says, and he ends the call.

“What’s… what’s going on?”

“I’m not sure,” Ezra says grimly. “But Gabe and Penina need us to pick them up. They’re at the police station.”

To be continued… 

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 927)