Rav Alter had aged, but not deteriorated, Leah saw with relief. Even after the brutal flight from Tel Aviv, there was still a spring in his step as he looked over the children.

Hearing the commotion, Cheryl had joined them with the baby, and Chasya and Mordechai Shalom went running to greet their grandparents.

“Oy, the kinderlach, so beautiful!” Fruma Esther exulted, her hand over her heart, whispering a silent prayer to the Aibishter, who was always nearby in her heart and her mind. “Look at that baby! What, red? Really, red curls? A broocha on his kepelah!”

“Like King David,” Yaakov said, laughing, as he caught his wife around her waist and kissed her, something else they would never have done in Boro Park.

He, too, had grown older, his short payos, neatly tucked behind his ears, a light but definite gray. But the lines around his mouth that had once turned down had now deepened into laugh lines, and the look of shock and despair that had once settled in his calm blue eyes had disappeared, replaced by a merry sparkle of happiness.

“And my Shaindele, my kallah-moide, come here to your bubbee,” Fruma Esther urged, taking in the young woman from her shining eyes to her lovely, slim figure. “Just like your beautiful mameh, may her memory be a blessing! She would have been so proud, so proud,” Fruma Esther whispered to the girl, hugging her. Then both of them wiped away a tear as they all headed inside the house to prepare for yet another family simcha.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have never before had any desire to compose a sequel, leaving my characters behind in various situations to muck through to the future by themselves in each reader’s imagination. But with An Unorthodox Match, the future of Yaakov and Leah came to me in a rush. By then, however, I had already written over four hundred pages, and so decided their future deserved a book of its own. This is that book.

I am imparting all this to make it clear that this book, too, is indebted to all those I acknowledged in my last book: those baalos teshuva who shared their life stories with me, my friends in Boro Park who took me in and guided me, and the teachers of the Hebrew Institute of Long Island, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Far Rockaway, who guided me to the life-altering decision to take my faith seriously. All the things Leah has experienced in turning from a secular to an Orthodox lifestyle, I, too, have experienced (with perhaps the exception of being run over by an incensed Hasid on a bicycle, although I, too, have often felt the wrath of the religious community in pointing out the lead feet of many a cherished community idol).