His Brother’s Wife
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
She used to make his breakfast every morning.
She had been up at six, the eggs already in the pan, the coffee going, the table set with a place mat and juice and a folded napkin by the time she heard the shower start. She had stood at the stove and let herself want things — just for those minutes, just while the toast browned and the apartment smelled like something warm and alive — let herself imagine that he would sit down and look at her, actually look at her, and ask how she had slept. She had wanted that every single morning. She had let herself want it because hope was the only thing she had that was entirely her own.
By February she had stopped making breakfast.
It had not happened all at once. First she stopped setting the table, just left the plate on the counter because he never sat down anyway. Then she stopped making enough for two. Then one morning in late January she had stood in the kitchen in her robe with her hand on the refrigerator door and simply could not make herself open it, could not locate the will to crack the eggs and heat the pan and set out the things he would eat in four minutes without looking up, and she had stood there with her hand on the cold handle until the feeling passed, and when it passed she went back to her room and sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the floor.
He left without breakfast. He did not mention it.
That was February.
The days had a shape still, back then. She got up. She dressed. She walked to the library or the grocery store or the park and came back. She made herself eat something at the kitchen table, usually standing because sitting at the table felt like a performance with no audience and she had grown tired of performing. She read in the armchair in her room in the afternoons, or tried to — the words kept sliding off the page, her eyes moving across a sentence and arriving at the end of it with no idea what it had said, and she would go back to the beginning and try again, and sometimes she managed it and sometimes she read the same paragraph seven or eight times and finally closed the book and sat with it in her lap and stared at the wall.
The wall had a water stain near the baseboard that she had never noticed before. She noticed it constantly now.
She thought about the same things, over and over, in no particular order and to no conclusion. She thought about Zack’s voice correcting her Hebrew and the way she had smiled and said of course you’re right and felt nothing — not hurt, not love, not anything. She thought about Joshua saying it smelled incredible about the challah and the way she had hid her face over the sink. She thought about the beit din, the cold corridor, his voice saying will you marry me Rebekah, and the way she had believed, in that moment, that something was beginning. She thought about the table set for two that she had eventually stopped setting. She thought about these things in a loop that had no exit, the same images cycling through at three in the afternoon and at two in the morning, wearing grooves in her mind the way water wears grooves in stone.
She stopped going to the library the second week of February.
She had meant to go. She had gotten dressed and put on her coat and stood at the apartment door with her hand on the knob and then sat back down on the couch instead, still in her coat, and stayed there for two hours while the February light moved across the floor. She told herself she would go tomorrow. She told herself the same thing the next day and the day after that, and after a while she stopped telling herself anything about the library.
Deborah called on a Tuesday and Rebekah let it ring.
She sat on the bed and watched the phone light up on the nightstand — Deborah’s name, Deborah’s warmth on the other end of the line, the one good thing in her week — and could not make herself pick it up. Not because she did not want to hear Deborah’s voice. Because she was afraid of what her own voice would sound like, afraid that Deborah would hear it and ask the direct question and she would not be able to answer it in any way that was not the truth. She let it ring until it stopped.
She called back that evening and left a message saying she had been in the shower. Her voice came out steady. She was a little surprised by that.
Sleep had become its own problem.
Some nights she lay in bed for four hours and did not sleep at all, her mind running the same loop — Zack, Joshua, the beit din, the table set for two — while the street outside went quiet and the light changed and she watched the ceiling and waited for morning as though morning were something that needed to be endured rather than something that would simply come. Other nights she went to bed at eight because there was nothing else to do and slept for twelve hours and woke feeling worse than when she had lain down, a heaviness on her chest like something pressing from the inside, and lay there in the gray light and found no reason to get up.
She lay there for a long time on those mornings. Sometimes until noon. She told herself she was tired. She told herself it was the winter, the cold seeping through the windows, the short gray days. She told herself a lot of things.
She knew they were not true.
There was a morning in the third week of February — she had lost track of the exact days by then, they blurred into each other without the shape of routine to separate them — when she woke at ten and lay in bed until two in the afternoon. She was not asleep. She was not resting. She was simply lying there, her eyes open, watching the light on the ceiling move from the gray of late morning to the grayer light of a February afternoon, and could not locate a single reason sufficient to make her get up. She thought about getting up. She thought about it the way you think about a task that belongs to someone else — abstractly, without urgency, from a great distance.
At two she got up and went to the bathroom and came back and got back into bed.
She did not eat that day.
Joshua came home at eleven. She heard his key in the lock and his coat on the hook and his footsteps in the hallway and the sound of his bedroom door closing, and she lay in the dark on the other side of the wall and felt nothing. Not longing. Not anger. Nothing. The nothing was in some ways worse than either.
She thought about going home.
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