Okay, money. How does a woman conjure half of a couple’s rent money without withdrawing it from the bank?

Really, it all boiled down to numbers.

Leebie let her phone swing down from her neck, adjusting the necklace strap absently.

It was easier to think about numbers than about… everything else. Easier than responding to Amram and telling him the grim truth.

So that’s all Leebie thought about as she sat frozen in Ita’s swivel chair, her forehead buried in her palms.

There were so many ways to make those numbers add up, if you got creative. And she’d get creative, she’d figure this out. Hadn’t she begged Amram to allow her to figure it out all those years?

Leebie lifted her head. On Ita’s screen, the tiny figures of the nurses in the three sections of the nursery flitted around between rows of cribs. Leebie’s eyes glazed over one nurse lifting a baby out of its crib and setting it down on the counter for a diaper change.

She’d understood Amram, over time. Understood his reasonable fear of an unrealistic commitment. But Amram had never understood her. “Why should parents get creative to figure out how to cover their couple’s rent? All their couples’ rent, mind you, because if you start with one, you gotta do it for all of them.” And every time they’d gotten into the argument, he’d logically gone on to explain how much more sense it made for each couple to get creative on their own to figure out how to cover their expenses. “Just like we did, right? Did our parents help us pay our rent when we got married?”

He made sense, of course, but he didn’t get it. How could she explain that it wasn’t about making sense but about their children. Yehudis. Didn’t he want to help her? Make her life easier in this way?

Clearly not.