Chapter 5

He picked her up at nine on Thursday morning.

She was waiting on the stoop of the Kingston Avenue building when he pulled up, wearing her dark coat and the sheitel and carrying a small purse that looked like it had been chosen very carefully for an occasion she wasn’t sure how to dress for. She had Zack’s death certificate folded in an envelope and her state ID already in her hand, which told him she had been ready for some time.

She got in and said good morning and then, before he could pull away from the curb, she reached into her purse and held out his Rolex.

“You should have this back,” she said. “It was your father’s gift to you. It belongs on your wrist, not in my purse.”

He looked at it in her palm. In the beit din he had given it without thinking, the only object of value he had on his person, the right gesture in the right moment. In the daylight on Kingston Avenue it looked like what it was — a watch his father had saved two years to buy him, sitting in the hand of a young woman who was returning it not because she didn’t value the gesture but because she valued him more than the symbol.

He took it and clasped it back on his wrist.

“Thank you,” he said.

“We should get real rings,” she said simply, and looked out the windshield.

He pulled away from the curb smiling.

They went to a jeweler on 47th Street that a colleague had recommended, a small shop run by a third-generation diamond dealer named Horowitz who took one look at them and asked no questions, which Joshua appreciated. Rebekah stood at the glass case and looked at the rings with the careful attention of someone who has never been allowed to want something like this and is not entirely sure how to begin.

She was slender — five foot five, maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds, everything about her proportional and fine-boned in a way the heavy coat had been hiding. Her hands on the glass were small, her fingers narrow, and Horowitz measured her ring size at a five and a half.

“What do you like?” Joshua asked her.

She pointed, almost shyly, at a three-quarter carat round solitaire in a white gold setting with small channel-set diamonds along the band. Classic, not flashy, the kind of ring that would look right on her hand.

“That one,” she said, and then immediately added, “but anything is —”

“That one,” Joshua told Horowitz.

When the jeweler brought it out and set it on the velvet pad, Rebekah looked at it the way you look at something you have seen in other people’s lives but never expected to hold in your hand. Horowitz slid it toward her and she picked it up carefully, turned it once in the light, and the diamond caught the overhead lamp and threw a small scatter of light across the glass case.