He often thought about Leah. He was more in love with her than ever, he realized, longing to see her when they were separated, suffering through the obligations that prevented him from spending more time with her. It seemed as if they were always being pulled apart. From the moment he got up in the morning, all his religious obligations hit him like a fierce undertow, tearing him out of her arms and dragging him far away: shower, get dressed, daven, eat, and then once again board the dirty, crowded, dilapidated tin box that took him far from her to an alien place he more or less despised. And then, when he was at last released, his children awaited him with their little anxious eyes and grasping hands, clamoring for his time and affection. The precious little time left unclaimed he had piously invested in Talmud study classes to assuage his guilt at leaving kollel and to combat the rot he feared was spreading in his soul. Aside from his children and Leah, they were the only part of his life that brought him joy.

And where was his wife, his Leah, in all of this? While she never, ever complained, he missed her so much, especially when their beds were pushed apart and they could not legally resume their intimate life together. He found it maddening.

All this came to him as a strange surprise. After all, the rhythm of married life for a devout Jewish couple never varied, and he had experienced all this before with his first wife. I somehow forgot that part. He shook his head. Or is it so much different this time around?

Leah was not the bride of his youth, when everything was new and thus unquestioned. She was the wife of his maturity, when everything in him had ripened and bloomed and deepened, his desires as well as his problems. The difficulties of his new secular job in an alien culture among strangers had hollowed out an emptiness in him that had not existed when he was a young husband among his own kind in kollel. He needed comfort and connection more now than he had then, more than any other time in his life.

And in the middle of this wrenching struggle to keep his balance and walk the tightrope between this difficult new job, his family responsibilities, and his spiritual life, had crashed this enormous, unexpected asteroid from outer space: Shaindele’s secret treachery!

It was unthinkable what had been going on behind his back. Unthinkable! Unheard of! That a daughter of his … He had never heard of anyone in his family or among his friends being faced with such a challenge. He was torn between the instinctive fury, disappointment, and disgust that welled up in him, and an equally instinctive fatherly love. It was his little, orphaned girl, after all, and she had suffered so much.