The display of new magazines on the newsstands caught her eye. Wait. Wait. Was that…?

Ari’s flight back from Morocco didn’t get back until a few days after Pesach, and Dassi had welcomed the downtime so she could consider deeply the concerns her family had discussed with her. Her sister Sara’s comments worried her in a way she couldn’t ignore.

She spent days thinking over what Sara had said, dredging up her memories of her father, of how her father interacted with her mother. Her father, there was no avoiding it, was callous, even standoffish. Nowadays, he and Dassi spoke every few weeks for a cursory check-in, but he didn’t take an avid interest in her life, and never really had since the divorce.

Ari was the complete opposite of that. He actively listened and cared about her wants and needs, and she constantly felt reassured of his... well, interest. And it wasn’t like they’d been dating for a few short weeks; it was already almost two months, and she felt like she knew him well.

And besides, Dassi’s mother had made it clear that the very reason she approved of Ari was because his generosity and willingness to give was nothing like Dassi’s father had been. Maybe she was the right one; Sara had been a child herself when they’d gotten divorced, so surely her mother had the clearer picture.

On the other hand, there were the unavoidable sticky spots over the course of their dating she knew she’d be foolish to ignore. The way he’d been so annoyed at the bystanders who had shown up on their concert date, the way he’d taken her silly hat shtick so personally, and how he’d reacted when she told him how she felt about that.

She was nervous about it, that was definitely true. But at the end of the day, no one got married without sacrificing something, and maybe she’d reached the age where she needed to make the decision with her head, not her heart. But she didn’t feel like she was a hundred percent ready to make a decision. With a pang, she wished that she could talk to Shira about this…. Maybe it was time to find a therapist who wasn’t one of her best friends?