“You boys have no idea where he wanders off to?”

Again, they shook their heads.

Aaron said, “He has a few friends. They might know better than us.”

Decker said, “I’ll ask them a little later. First, how about we take a walk over to your house?”

The boys said sure.

Nice kids, Decker thought. Breina and Ezra must be doing something right.

Up until yesterday, the pain had only surfaced on his birthday. Now it was an open wound festering inside Frieda Levine’s shattered heart. None of this would ever resolve until she made peace with the one she had abandoned.

God was giving her a test, using His most precious gifts to her. Though all her grandchildren were special, Noam was her most cherished because he had always been so troubled. In the many hours they had spent together, Noam seldom talked. But oh, how he’d been captivated by her tales, entranced by the criminal cases that had passed over her desk in the years she had worked at the court.

Hours of talking her throat dry, with him staring with those mystical eyes, drinking in her every word. Communicating without speaking, saying to her: So this is what the goyishe world is like.

Noam never asked questions, even when they were begging to be asked. Frieda felt he wasn’t very bright. But unlike Ezra, who also wasn’t bright, Noam never had the determination to overcompensate.

She and Noam hadn’t talked like that in four or five years, yet she remembered those conversations as if they had taken place yesterday.

Then he had stopped coming to her.

She thought nothing of it. There is that aching point in every grandmother’s life when the grandchildren cease to look at her as fun and simply view her as an old lady. It was normal.

But it hurt a little more with Noam—his rejection had been so sudden, so complete. As the others grew, they still made periodic stabs at being interested in her, inquiring about her health, pinching her cheek, complimenting her baking skills.

Your cookies are the best, Bubbe.

But Noam had withdrawn without looking back.

Still, she couldn’t take it personally. Noam was retreating from everyone. She should have seen it for what it was, a sign of deep-seated trouble. But having been accustomed to burying grief, she had looked the other way.

Now she was encountering both of her mistakes head-on. As she lay in her darkened bedroom, shades tightly drawn, tears skiing down her cheeks, she realized that she could no longer be an ostrich. She must right what had been wronged years ago.

But first she must wait until Noam was found.

If he was ever found.

The thought gave her chills.