“Tell you I’m all right? You tell me such a thing, that a pious man—recommended by Rav Alter, after he discussed it with the Bobelger Rebbe himself, who sends all the troubled girls in his community to Grub—is making sinful advances to my seventeen-year-old daughter? And that you heard this from a girl who has been sneaking behind her parents’ backs for months to meet and do who knows what with some yeshiva bum she met in a pizza parlor? And on the basis of that, you want to ruin a man’s reputation? Take away his livelihood?”

A searing disappointment, like a hot knife, ripped through Leah’s stomach. “Yaakov, I understand this is a shock. But I spoke to Shaindele. I asked her many questions and insisted on hearing all the details, and I’m telling you she is not making this up. He has been grooming her.”

“I don’t know what that means! Grooming, inappropriate. I’m not as smart as you, Leah. I never went to college. I’m just an ignorant, haredi yeshiva boy who has lived in this neighborhood—which is apparently Sodom and Gomorrah—his whole life,” he spit out in fury.

She was at a loss. She had never seen him like this. She didn’t know who this person was sitting next to her, filled with ignorant, unreasonable resentment and anger. She shifted her body, moving away from him.

The gesture incensed him even further. “This is not the first time that girl has come between us. Remember? Right after we got engaged, how she ran away to my brother’s? I wanted to let her stay there.”

“You wanted to let her get married! She was sixteen!”

“I never!” he began indignantly, then thought back on it. “It’s true I was angry. I said some things, but of course I wouldn’t have.”

“No? Are you sure?”

He was cut to the heart by this, and by her closed and furious face and molten eyes that couldn’t even bear to look at him.

He jumped up. “Where is she now? I’ll get the truth out of her!”

“She’s at Fruma Esther’s. I wanted to have a chance to talk to you about this without her. She’s terrified you won’t believe her and that you’ll force her to go back.”

“Of course she has to go back! If she doesn’t go back, Halpern will throw her out of school. She won’t graduate. You heard him!”

“That’s another thing. What is the principal of a girls’ school doing directing teenage girls to that pervert?”

“Vus is dus, ‘pervert’?”

Did he really not know English? Had he not been born and raised in America? “It’s a soteh.”

“This … that is loshon hara! Rechilus! You’ve completely taken her side without looking into it! Just because a silly girl makes accusations to cover her own sins!”