So Leah mourned by herself. She stopped going to work. Instead she tore the sleeves of her shirt and the hem of her own skirt and slept on the floor for a week. She didn’t eat anything for three days. On the third day, Leah’s mother, paralyzed by regret until then, spoke to her at last.

“Leah, we only want the best for you. I know it doesn’t always seem that way, but it’s true. We’ve been very worried about you. And we’ve been thinking that maybe what’s best for you now is to go back home. You could stay with Grandma.”

Leah didn’t know what to say. Her mother laid her hand against Leah’s cheek and asked her, “Do you have money for a ticket?”

Thanks to Aaron’s fire, Leah did.

The last dinner at home was the most horrible meal of Leah’s life. Everyone had managed to come home for it, even though it wasn’t Friday night. But no one spoke, not even her rowdy brothers. Without her mother’s blessing over their arrival in America, it felt as if they were eating sacrifices to pagan gods. Only afterward, as Leah packed the last of her things, did Leah’s father find the courage to speak.

“Since you’re going back, I wanted to give you something,” he said. Stepping into his bedroom, he opened a drawer and pulled out a small metal box, and as Leah watched, he straightened up and opened the lid. Inside the box was a set of tefillin.

“These were made for me by the scribe back home—you remember Raphael, the old man?” her father asked.

“Of course,” Leah answered.

“Good. Well, he’s an excellent scribe, and I don’t trust anyone on this side of the ocean to fool with these. Some of the parchments need to be repaired. I’m using my father’s set now, so I don’t need these at the moment, but I hoped that you might be able to bring them with you so that you can get them fixed and then send them back to me. I’m going to seal the box up with some paraffin so they won’t get damaged on the trip over, so don’t try to take them out until you get there, all right?”

Leah promised him. But when her ship began sailing out of New York Harbor, a giant empty ocean liner where she had the once-crowded steerage levels almost all to herself, she climbed up on deck to look out at the grimy, burning city. As the ship passed under the Statue of Liberty, she took the box with her father’s tefillin and tossed it overboard.