Lugging their wedding presents, Yaakov and Leah stepped over the threshold of the apartment. Its worn, familiar furniture, vigorously polished, winked dully from the shadows as the overhead fixture with its yellowish bulb came to life. On the walls of the old Boro Park apartment, newly plastered and painted a too-bright white in honor of its new occupant, hung the laminated jigsaw puzzles his first wife had patiently assembled with their children during long Sabbath afternoons, lovingly rehung by his daughter and his first wife’s mother. The family portraits, including the photographs of Zissele, also remained where they were. He saw Leah glance around, her eyes stopping to stare at them.

“Maybe I should have…,” he began uncertainly. What is the etiquette in such matters? he thought, lost. But she moved close to him, putting two fingers over his mouth.

“I love these photos. They’re the first time I laid eyes on you. And the jigsaw puzzles. Zissele will always be here in this house, because her children are here.”

“Do you mind? Does it hurt you?”

“What?”

“Does it hurt you that you have to share them with her? Take care of another woman’s children?”

She could have given him a quick, reassuring answer, she thought. Instead, she tried to tell the truth. “The older ones, the boys and Shaindele, will never be mine. I wouldn’t even want that. I just want to be there for them if they need me. But Icy and Cheeky”—she shook her head with a smile as she used her nicknames for the little ones, given when she was only a babysitter doing a good deed for a desperate and unhappy widower—“I don’t think of them as someone else’s. I fell in love with them long before I ever met you.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?” She smiled.

“For loving them and…” He stopped, taking off his big, black festive hat and laying it carefully on the dining room table. “For loving me,” he whispered.

How is this going to work? she wondered, her body yearning for his but held back by invisible wires. How do you get into bed with a man when your entire relationship has been absolutely nonphysical, even the slightest touch forbidden? How do you release the lock on passions chained and jailed by religious law? And how am I supposed to know what is acceptable among religious people once we are in bed? No one ever talked about that! Her counseling by the bride teacher, a frum woman with a huge scarf over her blond rebbitzen’s wig, had done little more than elaborate the final points of the laws governing abstinence and separation during her menstrual period. As for the rest, the woman had summed it up thus: “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the things I tell young virgin brides.”