“Well, we’ll have to arrange a pidyon haben for Meir. But it doesn’t change anything about you,” Ezra points out. He seems so confident that Rivi feels a surge of frustration.

“It changes everything. Abba wasn’t just… he wasn’t just an identity thief. We think he might have been an actual thief. A…” She fidgets with the chain of the swing, and Blimi jerks, a little off-balance. “Some kind of criminal mastermind. He started when he was a kid.”

“The medal.” Ezra is quick, and there’s relief in his eyes, as though it’s all beginning to come together for him. “But that was… if he wasn’t Avigdor Cohen, then why would he have stolen that medal?”

“I think they did it together. Maybe they did all of it together. They were friends in school. Avigdor… it seems like Avigdor died around when the big heist happened.”

“The other boy in the picture.” Ezra snaps his fingers. “That’s why Gabe was looking at yearbooks.” He pushes Shira at full force, sending her shrieking and flying upward. “Heist?”

“The lost treasures.” Rivi wants to sob again. “The ring. The stone. The coin. I never… we went to Eretz Yisrael for my bas mitzvah. It was so unexpected, such a huge expense that Abba covered out of nowhere. Weeks of touring and exploring and… and right around then, the stone reappeared on the black market.”

She’s only beginning to put it together now, the vague inconsistencies of her past. “Two nights ago, I found a ring in a vase from Abba’s house. The ring. Gabe is going to confirm it with some expert he knows, but it all makes sense. Abba was hiding this from us for our whole lives.”

“You found the ring? Mordechai’s ring?” Ezra sounds disbelieving.

“Allegedly.”

“The lost treasures?” Ezra stops pushing Shira, steps back, deaf to her sudden whining. He squints at Rivi through the sinking rays of the sun. “You think your father was a criminal mastermind? He barely left the house. He was doing odd jobs to get by. He called me back in December—”

“What?” Rivi jolts. She hadn’t known that. Abba had called her a couple of times over the months before he died, but she’d ignored the calls, had skimmed the voicemail transcriptions and scowled at the requests for her to call him back. They’re somewhere deep in her phone’s archives now.

Ezra shrugs. “It wasn’t… I didn’t think you’d want to hear about it. And it wasn’t really anything. I didn’t know he was sick. He just asked me how you were doing. How the kids were doing. I told him to ask you. But he… he sounded so sad. So tired. Not like he was hiding secret priceless objects in his house.”

“He was a good liar.” This much, Rivi knows. “I guess someone knows about all of this. Gabe said he found a note from Eretz Yisrael in the study, a threatening message. It must be why we left in such a hurry. And now that Abba’s dead, they’re coming after us.”

She shivers. She hasn’t been a target of the mysterious stalker, but she still feels suddenly exposed in this brightly colored playground, surrounded by children and babysitters and mothers.

Ezra follows her gaze, his own thoughtful. “What can I do to help?” he asks.

“No.” Rivi looks at him with dismay. “Absolutely not.” Telling him is one thing. Involving him would be a crisis. “This is my issue. It’s my family—” And they’re a disaster, twisted and wrong in all the ways that Ezra could never understand. Again, she feels the protectiveness rise, the determination that Ezra won’t see all of their dirty laundry.

“It’s my family, too.” Ezra sets Shira down on the ground, and Blimi rushes to hold his other hand. He walks them to the slides, and Rivi trails after him. His face is set. “Abba was my father-in-law. He wasn’t some client of yours, living in your work world. And I would have… I would have liked to know him better when he was alive.”

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Rivi says wearily. “Ours wasn’t a relationship you could fix. He wouldn’t give you some greater insight on my childhood or personality or whatever you think that he might—”

“I wanted the kids to have their grandfather. For you to have your father.” Ezra’s eyes narrow, and Rivi is suddenly tense. Are they going to fight in the park, in front of all these women and kids?

She laughs, bitter and sharp. “I didn’t want him. I want him even less now. He was a liar and a thief and nothing about him was genuine. And I don’t want you seeing any of… he was a mess, Ezra. My family is so, so messy. I just wanted to keep you away from it.” The explanation emerges in a rush of complicated emotion, shame, and indignant stubbornness and grief. “I didn’t want my father poisoning my family like he did his.”

All she had wanted was to have a safe place, free of the baggage of her past. For Ezra to be untouched by Abba’s shadows, so she could capture the simplicity and normalcy she’d craved for a lifetime. Instead, her efforts had created hostility between them, stress and anger and secrets, and she can only blame one person for it. “Abba managed it anyway, somehow, from beyond the grave.”

“It wasn’t Abba who did that.” Ezra’s gaze is narrowed, but his words are even. Rivi reels beneath them, is hurt and defensive, and then defeated in a wave of sorrow.

“No,” she whispers. “I guess not.” She can’t bring herself to apologize outright, to let more justifications or self-flagellation pour from her heart, but Ezra must hear it in her tone, because his shoulders relax and his eyes go gentle again.

Ezra reaches out to catch Shira from where she’s dangling at the top of the fireman’s pole. “I’m going to be a part of this from now on.” His voice is firm, unyielding, but still kind. “No more secrets.”

“No more secrets,” she concedes, leaning against the side of the play structure. She feels a little dizzy, overwhelmed but reassured, somehow, by Ezra’s steadiness. “I don’t like you being involved.”

“You don’t always call the shots.” Ezra offers her a ghost of a smile. “You can’t control everything, no matter how much of a force of nature you are. And… you don’t always know what’s best for you.”

Rivi straightens. “If this is about Boyd—”

“It’s eating up all of your time. It’s running you ragged.” Ezra doesn’t look angry anymore, exactly, but unhappy. Yet determined, as though he might persuade her. “And for what? A little more money? A little more job security? I’m in no rush. You’ll get there eventually.”

“I wanted to get there now.” It’s more than she likes to admit, a confession that feels dangerously close to vulnerability. “I just… this is the one thing that I’m really good at.” She’s pretty shaky on being a wife, being a mother, being a sister. Her job is the only part of her life where she actually feels successful.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Ezra says easily, and when he smiles at her, it feels genuine. “I don’t want you to be so focused on getting somewhere that you miss out on the rest of your life along the way.” He nods up to Blimi, sitting at the top of the big slide and holding up the line of children. “Go ahead. Play with the kids.”

She darts an anxious look at him, remembers his angry words on Sunday night. You’re so busy that you barely have time for… for our family, for our kids—

“Not because you’ll feel guilty if you don’t,” Ezra says, as though reading her mind. “But because I believe you’ll enjoy it. Because you love them, and you don’t need to be with them every second of the day to show that.”

Gingerly, under his expectant gaze, Rivi climbs up to the platform at the top of the play structure, where a few kids are shoving at the line to the big slide, and Blimi looks near tears. “Mommy!” she cries out, holding her arms up to Rivi. “I don’t wanna go down!”

“Are you afraid?”

Blimi bobs her head. Rivi considers, Blimi’s brown eyes fixed on her, and she scoots down to sit on the platform next to Blimi. “When I get scared, I like to do the thing that scares me once, just to prove that I can.” She tugs Blimi onto her lap, feels little fingers slide trustingly into hers. “Shall we?”

Blimi bobs her head, and Rivi pushes off. They fly down together, Blimi shrieking so loudly that she might have shattered Rivi’s eardrums, but she’s laughing when they land, seizing Rivi’s hand. “Again!” she demands, her shining eyes a balm to Rivi’s bruised heart.

“My turn!” Shira objects, grabbing Rivi’s other hand. She takes them both the next time, then the next. She isn’t great at playing with the kids on the floor, building with them or playing pretend, but the slide is nice. Exhilarating, really, feeling her girls in her arms, hearing their giggles and shrieks, lifting them afterward for a hug. Shira leans against her, grasping tightly as she whoops, and it makes Rivi choke up a little.

She loves these little girls, stubborn, fearless Shira and dreamy, sweet Blimi. She loves Meir, so mature and thoughtful, and Shimmy, inquisitive and creative. Maybe she isn’t always what they want. Maybe she isn’t always enough for them. But they will always be enough for her.

She holds their hands when they leave the park, Shira swinging between Rivi and Ezra.

“It’s funny,” Ezra says, his eyes bright again with laughter. “But you know what I’m looking forward to? Getting to spend a little more time with Gabe and Hillel. I spend so much of my day around kids, and I love kids, but it’ll be nice to have some adults to hang out with.”

He speaks about excavating Abba’s past as though it’s an adventure instead of the thing that nearly killed Gabe and Penina. Rivi wants to remind him of that, to drive home how terrifying every part of this is. This isn’t a little genealogical investigation or family outing. This is a secret so massive that Rivi is still struggling to process it while dealing with the threat of someone on their tail.

But Ezra isn’t irritated about Boyd right now, or upset with her about Suri, and Rivi can’t find it in herself to break this new, fragile peace between them. So she smiles tightly and says nothing.

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 929)