She wanted so much to live a good life. She wanted to be happy, with that unique yearning felt by the young who are full of health and dreams and energy. Even with all the pain she had experienced, the optimism that is part of having lived so few years was strong inside her; the idea that it is possible to change things, to make them different, better; the idea that it is perfectly feasible to overcome the past and forget it. The proof of that was in her father’s eyes. He was walking a new path, and so could she.

She could go forward in a way unique to her alone. And it could be light-filled, with a luminescence that would shine brighter and brighter with each step, the way her father’s eyes shone now with something new, something surprising and unexpected, that had happened to him. She did not yet know where to find that path, only that it was out there, waiting.

Leah, the young woman she had fought against for so long, was now part of her life, taking on herself so many of the burdens people had thoughtlessly piled on her, mistaking her youth for competence, resilience, and strength, when just the opposite was true. She’d been inexperienced, rigid, and weak. But that was the past. She felt confident that at the very least all her tragedies and missteps had taught her something about the world and particularly about herself. She felt sure it was possible to grow and get better.

She didn’t know what the future would hold, but her young heart yearned that it be a better life than a short and troubled one filled with pain like that of her poor mother. Her heart still ached for her mother, but now, finally, she felt the possibility of healing was not so far off. Only then, she told herself, could her heart truly open to all life’s possibilities.

How strange that this young woman she had feared, despised, rejected, and battled against had become the catalyst for that opening! As if she were a flower and Leah rain.

Whatever ugly things people said about baale teshuva, there was something comforting—inspiring, even—about a woman raised in the great, free outside world leaving it all behind to join them in their narrow lives. Far from weakening her faith, it had strengthened her belief and her understanding, making her feel that she needn’t doubt the path she had been raised to follow, because even others, who had followed a wider road, had voluntarily chosen to find their way there.

By the time school ended, the short daylight hours of winter had already faded as she headed home through the smoky glow of streetlamps that filtered through the thinning autumn leaves. All around, she saw people moving, hurrying—bewigged mothers pushing baby carriages, young Talmud students carrying heavy books, children balancing on bicycles.