“Yaakov, the best thing you can do for me is to stay the man I fell in love with. A good man. A kind man. A loving man whose whole life has been dedicated to making the world a better place. The world is full of two-hundred-and-fifty-pound gorillas pounding people into pulps; it doesn’t need another one. There has to be some good people in the world. Otherwise, why would HaShem keep it spinning? Why would He bother to put the sun in the sky every morning? It’s a way of being grateful, isn’t it? Showing Him that what He’s created He did for people who deserve it? Don’t ever change, Yaakov, please. Let HaShem deal with the bicycle man.”

But her words didn’t reach him. “Sometimes I think I’ve wasted my time,” he said bitterly. “I can’t do anything. Earn a living, even protect my wife and children!”

“Please, don’t tell yourself that! What happened to us just proves the opposite, that people are desperate for truly wise men and educators, teachers who can take our Torah out of the hands of the hypocrites who distort and twist its message, presenting themselves as the most devout, the most knowledgeable, when they don’t know anything at all.”

“They are arrogant, ignorant,” he fumed, the violence rising inside him again.

“‘Who is a hero? The person who conquers his Evil Inclination,’” she admonished softly, quoting the well-worn adage from Ethics of the Fathers. She reached out to him, touching his arm, which was as hard and tense as the gleaming cold metal of a weapon.

Her touch traveled through him, breaking down the barriers inside him, wrapping itself around his inner wounds like a healing salve. He sobbed, pounding the dashboard.

“Don’t,” she implored, frightened. She had never seen him like this, this gentle man, this scholar; the man she looked up to and wanted to emulate. He, too, was wounded, she realized. He was losing his faith. Not in God but in his friends and neighbors, the world he had grown up in and cherished, and which had cherished him back even as it had despised her and tried to keep them apart; the world whose foolish mores had condemned his young wife to death and pushed his innocent, troubled teenage daughter off the rails, turning her into an outcast. It was a world she had for some time ceased to believe in and trust. Ironically, they were now more than ever on the same wavelength. And that was a blessing, an answer to her prayers, no matter how it had come about.

They took a few rest stops to use the bathrooms. And when they got hungry, they stopped and laid out a picnic on a roadside table, buying the children rabbinically approved brands of ice cream in the nearby convenience store.

The light was fading fast as they reached the exit ramps for Folkestone, Virginia.