She got up and paced through the dingy little apartment where she had fallen in love with the children, and then their young father, starting a life with so much promise, so much richness. She touched the laminated jigsaw puzzles hanging on the discolored walls put together over long Shabbos afternoons by the children and their mother, pictures of pretty forests and rivers, children playing by the shore. She paused at the shelf of family photos: Shaindele’s sweet round face, her hair tied in bows; baby Mordechai Shalom with his long, golden curls in his mother’s young arms; Chasya in her Queen Esther Purim costume. And there, too, was the wedding photo of herself in the lustrous white dress she’d borrowed from a gmach that fit her so well, her red curls elegantly gathered and dressed with pearls, standing next to her tall, handsome husband, both of them beaming with happiness. Only recently had it even been framed!

And now, she realized, their lives as they knew them were over. So soon!

She tried to think of how she had unwittingly destroyed all that was so precious to her. What had been her sin? Where had she taken a wrong turn? She tried to remember every act she had committed, every conversation she had had, combing through them the way a mother combs a child’s hair looking for lice and the little white eggs that cling to the cleanly shampooed hair waiting to hatch and multiply, to infect and destroy. That was it! She had obviously missed one or two—little sins. Perhaps she had held resentment in her heart for something she overheard a neighbor saying about her and, instead of confronting them, had held it inside? Perhaps she had been unkind to her husband without realizing it, or forgotten to give charity? Little eggs, clinging, that had now hatched and were multiplying, crawling over her life. Or perhaps it was much worse: not small sins but inexcusable transgressions like the sin of ingratitude, of always wanting, pleading, for more, more, more instead of counting all God’s many blessings?

She sat down at the dining room table and took out Maimonides’s Sefer HaMitzvos, which she had been in the process of learning before her wedding. According to Jewish law, there were 613 commandments that a Jew was obligated to observe. Some were positive like love your neighbor, love God; and some were negative like don’t steal, don’t gossip, don’t commit adultery. One by one, she sifted through them, judging herself as harshly as she could.