Right after the wedding, she had found it hard to become accustomed to such luxuries. “I’m not a child! I can take care of my own clothes and make my own lunches, Leah,” she’d protested. But Leah had only laughed.

“There is plenty I expect you to do, Shaindele. Don’t worry that I’m going to spoil you! Now off you go, you’ll be late.”

“But don’t you want me to drop off the children?”

“I’ll take them in the car,” Leah said. “It’ll be quicker.”

The car—the gleaming blue Honda Civic, purchased secondhand with Leah’s income and the wedding gifts—now parked on the street right outside their apartment building, ready to take them on Sunday picnics and to museums and zoos. If anything delineated the border between their old lives and this new one, it was the car, and her father’s suddenly youthful face as he kissed everyone goodbye in the morning.

As Shaindele walked to class with carefree ease, she couldn’t help but remember the old days when all of it had been her responsibility: cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare; the feeling of panic and self-hatred as dirty dishes and pots left over from the Sabbath piled up on the counters and hampers stinking of a week’s worth of soiled children’s clothes fouled the air. The disorder, the unhappy, crying children, her schoolwork, the missed days of classes … She must never go back to that again, never!

She sat down behind her desk, closing her eyes for a moment before steadying her shaking hands to grip a pen and notebook as she waited for the lesson to begin. She wasn’t the same person as the young girl who had come to school the year before, she realized, her heart broken from the loss of her mother, her head a mass of confusion, struggling with an anger and resentment that often boiled over, threatening to tear her fragile young heart apart.

But with the healing had come some scars. In witnessing the pitiless end that had come to her mother, part of her youth had been robbed from her, part of her innocence. She would never again be able to look out at the world through the eyes of a child. She had seen a part of the world she had never been meant to see, and which now could never be unseen.