Chapter 9

They kept her overnight.

The hour was too late and the dosage too uncertain for the attending physician to feel comfortable with anything less. Joshua sat in the chair beside her bed through the night — not sleeping, barely moving, watching the machines and the slow rise and fall of her chest and the way the hospital light made her look younger than eighteen, younger than anyone should look in a bed like that. A nurse came in every hour. He answered her questions and went back to watching.

Around four in the morning Rebekah’s eyes opened.

She looked at the ceiling first, then at the machines, then at him. Her face moved through something complicated and then went still.

“You’re here,” she said. Her voice was rough from the tube they had put down her throat.

“I’m here.” He leaned forward. “How do you feel?”

She considered the question seriously, the way she considered everything. “Tired,” she said. “Ashamed.”

“Don’t.” The word came out harder than he intended. “Don’t be ashamed. That’s mine. Not yours.”

She looked at him for a long moment and then looked back at the ceiling and did not say anything else, and he did not push her, and they stayed like that in the hospital quiet until the light outside the window began to change.

They discharged her at nine the following morning with paperwork and instructions and the name of a doctor Joshua wrote down and folded into his pocket. He brought her coat. He held it for her while she put it on, her movements slow and careful, and then he walked beside her through the hospital corridor and out through the sliding doors into the March morning, and did not let go of her arm.

She did not pull away.

He drove her home without the radio.

The apartment was exactly as they had left it — the hallway light still on from the night before, her bedroom door standing open. He had not gone back to his room to get the rings from his pillow. He was not ready to see them there again. He helped her to the couch and made tea and brought it to her and sat in the chair across from her and looked at her — really looked at her, the way he had not looked at her since the corridor in the beit din — and felt the full weight of what he had done settle onto him like something physical.