“You locked the door behind us, right?” This isn’t a neighborhood where doors have to stay locked at all times. Penina lives a few blocks away, and she’s never thought twice about leaving her door open while Daniel plays alone on the porch. As a single woman living alone with a child, she’s more cautious than most, but that usually amounts to locking the door when she leaves and twisting the deadbolt before bed.

But here, even at midday, Penina is uneasy, on edge in this shadowed, faded living room. It’s a big house. There are so many tiny nooks and crannies, so many places where someone could hide. So many places where a mysterious stalker might be lurking, just waiting for them to let their guard down.

She remembers the note that Gabe had found last month, the menacing words on it. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID. Who had known? What had they known?

Rivi looks askance at Penina. “Gabe told you about the intruder? I doubt it was really anything. It was probably just the wind, or a few kids exploring a house they thought was abandoned.” But she also looks anxious. She turns the doorknob again as though to reassure herself that the door is locked.

“Yes, it’s probably nothing.” Gabe, Penina suspects, hadn’t told Rivi about being tailed out of Bearwood.

“He’s always had an overactive imagination,” Rivi offers weakly. “When we were kids, at bedtime, he used to make my father check the closet for monsters. Under the bed, too. Sometimes the bathroom.”

“Daniel tried that on me. After two nights of it, I told him I’d conferenced with the monster under his bed, and it told me that it only ate pickled herring and not little boy toes.” Penina laughs. It rings out loud and echoing in the silent house. “I can’t believe your father put up with it every night.”

“Bedtime was… he was always good about bedtime.” There’s a faint whistling, and Penina spins around, sees nothing, and shivers. Rivi gives her a look and goes on. “He used to read to me from this massive book of fairy tales. The really obscure ones, the ones with gruesome endings that were sanitized for kids. You’re still chatting with Gabe?”

Rivi slides the question in so fluidly that it takes Penina a moment to register it. “Yes. No. We just— we talked when he offered to take Daniel. Nothing else since last Sunday, really.”

“Right.” Rivi moves toward a large credenza in the dining room. It’s polished wood, left dusty with disuse, with three drawers across the top and cabinets directly below each. “I keep saying it, but—”

“Be careful. I know.” Penina opens a cabinet. It’s full of mismatched china, some of it delicate enough to be antique and others tough and modern. “I’m a big girl, Rivi. I don’t need to be protected.”

“He isn’t going to stay.” Rivi pulls another cabinet open with extra force. “He’s been absorbed in that article this week. It’s only a matter of time before he goes back.”

“Shouldn’t be too long,” Penina says neutrally. She thinks that Gabe’s sudden focus on work has more to do with the scare in Bearwood than any renewed passion for the Xipaia people, but she keeps the thought to herself.

Rivi pulls a few bowls out of the cabinet. They’re covered in a film of dust, untouched for ages, and she makes a face at them. “Ugh. Maybe we can donate this stuff. Do you… how do you feel about Gabe going back?” Now she looks worried.

“I don’t know. It’s… it’s pointless to feel anything about it,” Penina says honestly. “I’m divorced, and he’s….” Maybe he’s a Kohein. Maybe he isn’t.

Gabe had always felt so young before, with that boyish charm and boundless enthusiasm for the unknown. Now, he carries himself differently. He’s more thoughtful, slower to react, still easygoing but guarded. She remembers being young, too, fiercely passionate about her own work and so confident. She wouldn’t make bad decisions. She wouldn’t trust the wrong people.

Now, she is more willing to listen, to second-guess, to know her own limitations. Now, she thinks, she’s someone who wouldn’t throw herself into an engagement with a boy that unstable. But the man that Gabe has become isn’t that boy, either.

Pointless, she reminds herself. Rivi is watching her very closely.

She buries herself in the credenza. “This is nice.” She tugs out a vase. It’s a pretty teal color, with a long-stemmed lavender flower molded along it giving it a delicate look.

Rivi’s eyes light up. “I loved that vase. I put it on the table every Shabbos.” Penina passes it to her, and Rivi runs her finger along the curve of the stem. “I wondered where it went.”

She sets it on the table, separate from the rest of the china, and returns to her spot. Penina pulls less attractive vases out, then more serving pieces. She feels oddly exposed here, in the dining room at the base of the upstairs staircase, where anyone could walk up to the porch and see her, where anyone could peer out of a bedroom and catch sight of her.

She feels a prickle at the back of her neck and looks up, her breath hitching. Rivi’s bedroom is visible at the top of the staircase, a sliver of light from a window illuminating it. The door is barely open, and there is something inside that looks, from the corner of her eye, like a person.

It isn’t. Of course it isn’t. But there is a creak from somewhere in the house, and she twists around suddenly.

“It’s just the house settling,” Rivi says quietly, but she looks as unnerved as Penina.

“Let’s just get through this room.” Penina finishes her cabinet and turns to the drawer with grim determination. It’s full of old papers, unopened bills and junk mail and a few notebooks near the bottom. She opens one of them and squints at the drawing inside.

“I think this is yours.” Someone has drawn a ring at the top of the page, then a rectangular item, then a lopsided circle with faint, painstaking writing.

Rivi takes the notebook. “Definitely not.” She sounds wry. “I know these three. The ring, the stone, the coin. Very up Gabe’s alley.”

“The ring, the stone… the lost treasures?” Penina vaguely remembers them. Mordechai’s ring, allegedly. The onyx stone that might’ve been on the Choshen, now recovered. The machatzis hashekel from the first Beis Hamikdash. They’re sketched out with precise detail, down to the fractals of the stone and a fault line through it. “Of course Gabe was obsessed with those artifacts.” It’s the most Gabe thing she’s ever heard.

“Of course,” Rivi echoes, but her brow furrows. “Though Gabe couldn’t have sketched like this. Abba used to say that he had Ima’s stick-figure talent.” She puts the notebook aside. “We need a new recycling bag.”

“I’ll get it.” Penina jumps to her feet, eager to escape the dining room’s open space. But the kitchen is nearly as bad, the basement door ajar behind her. For a moment, she thinks that she can hear someone downstairs, the even sounds of breathing, but she forcibly pushes it aside, grabs a garbage bag from the cabinet, and hurries out again.

This house just feels… off today. Hadn’t Gabe said it was a black sedan that followed him? There are two parked on the block, visible from the window. She shudders and returns to the credenza. Rivi is sitting back against it, typing busily on her phone.

“Boyd?” Penina guesses.

“Boyd.” Rivi finishes her email and sends it off. “He thinks he has something else, but it seems like a big nothingburger to me. You know Boyd by now.”

“Enthusiastic. Needy.”

“Like only a billionaire can be,” Rivi says ruefully. “And somehow, it’s always after work hours when he has these big ideas.” She leans her head against the credenza, suddenly tired. “It’s been… Ezra hasn’t taken it well.”

“He’s still upset that you took the case?” Penina is surprised. Ezra is usually a saint, easygoing and supportive, and Rivi rarely confides in her about any tension between them. “Has it really been that overwhelming?”

“I’ve been balancing everything. I don’t answer Boyd’s calls during bedtime or dinner, when I’m there. But it’s been….” Rivi sighs, and she looks so miserable that Penina reaches out to squeeze her shoulder. “We’re not fighting. We’re just… barely talking when it isn’t about the kids. Everything I do lately goes wrong. I blew up at Suri last Shabbos. She always knows what to say to get to me.”

“Like what?” Rivi used to be better at rolling her eyes at Suri, Penina thinks. She’s been raw lately, vulnerable in a way that she never usually allows herself to be.

“That I put my career ahead of my family. That I’m not there for my kids. That I’m not a natural mother. That I put too much on Ezra’s shoulders and he’s at his limit.” Rivi pulls up her knees and wraps her arms around them like they’re still girls, whispering secrets late at night. “It wouldn’t get me so worked up if I didn’t feel sometimes like she’s right. Like I push and push and push and Ezra does so much—”

“You do plenty.” Penina scoots over to sit next to her, the two of them leaning against the middle cabinet of the credenza. “I see you with your kids. They’re so proud of you. And I know you make every effort to spend time with them—” Rivi pushes herself so hard, tries endlessly to be everything for everyone, and all she can see is the ways that she falls short.

Even now, she only offers Penina a wan smile, and Penina knows that she isn’t getting through. There’s only one person who might. “Talk to Ezra,” she urges Rivi. “Tell him how you’re feeling. Talk to him about the kids and Suri and… and maybe some of this, too.” She gestures at the room around them, drowning in secrets that Rivi bears alone. “He might surprise you.”

Rivi laughs wetly. “Talking only made it worse before. It’s not going to solve anything now.” She stares up at nothing, and Penina follows her gaze to the vase on the table. Rivi stares at it as though it holds the answers to everything, as though it might be a solution. “I have to fix it myself. Do you think Suri would like a vase?”

Penina has always seen Rivi as unstoppable, as an overachiever who can do anything. But this… she isn’t so sure that Rivi can do this alone.

She sits with her in the silence, dim and dusty and sad. And maybe it’s only her nerves, but again she thinks she hears a faint movement from the basement.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 921)