Chapter 3

The morning of the halitzah, Joshua wore a suit.

Not the dark one he’d worn to the funeral — a different one, charcoal gray, the one he wore to client presentations when he wanted to be taken seriously. He stood in front of the mirror knotting his tie and did not examine too closely why it mattered what he wore to a ceremony whose entire purpose was to release him from an obligation he had already decided not to fulfill.

Katie had not asked where he was going. She knew. She’d kissed him at the door with her hands flat on his chest and said, “Call me after,” in a tone that carried everything she wasn’t saying, and he had told her he would, and now he was driving across the bridge in the gray December light toward a synagogue on Eastern Parkway where five judges and two witnesses were waiting to formally sever whatever thread his brother had tied between him and Rebekah Libowitz.

He told himself it would take an hour. He told himself that by noon it would be finished and he could begin the process of becoming, again, simply a man with a girlfriend and a career and a future that looked more or less like what he had planned.

He parked on the street and sat in the car for two minutes before he went in.

She was standing near the entrance with her mother, wearing a dark dress, the sheitel neat and somber above her pale face. She looked like a woman preparing to endure something. When she saw him come through the door she straightened slightly, and he crossed the room and shook Sarah Libowitz’s hand and said good morning, and then he looked at Rebekah.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m all right.” A small pause. “You look well.”

“Thank you.” He felt obscurely that he should apologize for something, though he could not have said what.

Rabbi Menachem appeared from a side room and led them through to the beit din — the rabbinical court, a long room with high windows and a plain wooden bench where five judges sat in a row, solemn and deliberate. Two additional witnesses occupied chairs at either end. The room smelled of old books and beeswax candles and the hushed weight of a place where serious things had been decided for a very long time.

The judges were introduced. The proceedings were explained in Hebrew and then briefly in English for Joshua’s benefit, without condescension but without assumption either. This was a beit din that had done this before.