No one was home when she got there. Leah had no doubt gone to pick up the children. She was almost grateful not to be met with her stepmother’s kind, searching eyes that would tempt her to allow all that she had experienced to pour out like pus from a wound. Better to wash it off with some tears and bind it up with silence and hope it would heal.

But again and again, the questions streamed through her, aching like the pain of a serious bruise. What just happened? Who is this Yoel Grub? And, most of all, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

Obviously, she could never go back there. No, Yoel Grub was a fraud and a pervert. But who would believe her? Her parents, who were spending so much money to help her? After all, hadn’t her father supposedly thoroughly checked him out? Her principal, who was his good friend and also Duvie’s father? She had a brief moment of thinking about the expression “Apples don’t fall far from the trees.”

If she said anything, whose side would everyone take? The wayward girl’s caught sneaking out with a boy she met in Moishy’s Pizza, doing who knows what? Or the pious man entrusted with caring for such girls by Boro Park’s distinguished Bobelger Rebbe for the last twenty-five years?

She closed her eyes and lay down on her bed. She was just a stupid teenager who had done so many foolish things in her life. Maybe she was just wrong? After all, what did she know? Maybe Yoel Grub had done nothing wrong. Maybe he was the tzaddik everyone claimed, and these were simply his methods, his professional methods, that he learned in a professional school that trained people to be psychologists and helpers? After all, hundreds of girls had gone to him over the years, and no one had ever complained, so what did she know? Maybe he really could help her. And she needed help, wanted it so badly. Wasn’t it she who had asked to see a psychiatrist in the first place? She needed to get over the loss of her mother, to go forward in her life. She needed to understand why she didn’t want to get married or have children. She needed to understand why she had let Duvie do those things to her.

Why had she?

Throbbing with fear and confusion, she turned her face to the wall. What am I going to do now?

Leah found her that way, fast asleep.

“Shh,” she told Chasya, putting a finger to her lips and closing the door gently. “Your sister is sleeping.”

“Why? It’s not so late. It’s not night. We didn’t even eat our dinner or have a bath!” The child was indignant at this strange behavior.