“This is destroying you!” Ezra doesn’t budge, doesn’t back down, and Rivi can feel her heart racing

T

he nightly crisis has begun.

Meir has gone to sleep. With Gabe out with Penina, Rivi is alone with Ezra, moving through the kitchen and living room and sharply conscious of his presence. To flee upstairs would be a surrender that she can’t afford. She has work to do.

Ezra is learning at the dining room table, and Rivi retreats to her office without a word. She works on a brief, her mind drifting elsewhere.

Gabe is on a date with Penina. She disapproves fiercely, is positive that Gabe is going to run off again, that he hasn’t thought any of this through. But there’s a tiny, hopeful little bubble within her that sings a song of what if? What if Gabe stayed? What if they did get married?

Penina has been extremely selective about whom she dates ever since her divorce. She likes to act as though she hadn’t been affected by the broken engagement, that it hadn’t left an impact on how she views dating and marriage, but Rivi’s been beside her this whole time. Penina had rushed to marry someone poorly suited to her, had broken away from him just over a year later, has been reluctant to say yes to the men suggested to her. She is highly cautious. Sensible.

It isn’t like her to rush headlong into a shidduch, especially one this precarious. It feels almost like the younger Penina, cheerful and a little dreamy, ready to take risks and ignoring potential consequences.

Rivi worries about her. And persistent in the part of her mind she can never quite excise, there are worries about someone else as well.

Because if this ends badly, Penina won’t run. But Gabe will. Rivi can already taste the sting of betrayal, the looming threat of abandonment, again, from the only person who really grasps all of her, from start to finish. It’ll be better that way, she tells herself, just as she had five years ago. I’ll never have to think about Abba again.