And after that it would have been enough to just know that he was out there. Probably in a classroom teaching other sixth-grade kids. But now there won’t be that once. What Honey said yesterday on the massage table is right: What is so hard to process is the knowing for certain. We won’t see Mr. Sandler again. I know it, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me.

As I sit in the back with Honey—Honey, who went to play with the children when no one else thought to—a tidal wave of shame at my thoughtlessness and selfishness rises up and breaks over me. What Honey said about me in our fight might have been right too. Because I don’t know about fate, destiny, and hashgachah pratit, but I suddenly see how I have been thinking only of myself. Like a movie screen unrolling down and showing images, I see Mrs. Sandler in her torn blouse and socks, and I see three little dark-haired boys, the middle one who looks just like Mr. Sandler—his dad. I see the shock, misery, and confusion on their faces. This family has broken, and the missing piece cannot be glued back in: It is gone forever. I take out Ezra’s crumpled tissue from my pocket and wipe the tears flowing down my cheeks.

“Sometimes things just happen, Milla,” Honey says, breaking into my thoughts again and handing me a clean tissue from a battered tissue box on the floor.

For a second, like the moon hovering in the darkness before a cloud covers it again, I have a picture in my mind of a red wheelbarrow, its surface wet and shiny. So much depends on everything else, and everything is connected. We just don’t know why or how until it happens. And then we have to deal with it.

The next week passes in a haze. On the morning of the speech contest, my class files down the hall and down the stairs, but when we get to the auditorium, they are shepherded into the rows of folding chairs while Ms. Silver puts her arm around my shoulder and leads me up a narrow staircase onto the stage. I swallow. My stomach feels like the huge food processor Mrs. Wine uses to make her potato kugel—it whirs and pulses, whirs and pulses, whirs and pulses.

All the stage lights are on and beaming toward an arrangement of folding chairs placed in a semicircle. Already seated is a girl I recognize from the eighth grade. Her hair is pulled back tautly under a thin hair band, her ankles crossed perfectly, her back straight, and a big smile on her face. Next to her is a boy I saw earlier this morning—his tie was loosened, cocky-like, but it is now straightened and tight to his collar. It was easy to identify the contestants because we are allowed to wear our own clothes today. I am wearing the black-and-white Shabbat dress that I carefully laid out last night on my chair, and the sequined cardigan I threw on top at the last minute this morning.