“No, I’m just being honest with you,” Yehudah said, leaning forward. “You’re picking a flawed stone. And once you buy it, you’ve got to like all of it. So just be prepared for that.”

Jake remembered the first time he met Leora, in the museum, all the horrible questions she had asked him, the nasty way she managed to drive nails right into his heart. She was still petulant now.

He looked again at the diamond below the loupe. There was a small cluster of inclusions near one of the pavilion’s facets, invisible to the naked eye, probably impossible to see even with magnification once it was set. But under the magnifying lens, he could see what looked like tiny pieces of soil caught within the stone, like packed-up treasures buried in a closet, reminders of where it had come from. “I’ll take this one,” he said, laying the tongs down on the table.

THEY HAD been married for over a year when Yehudah finally confronted her about it. He hadn’t minded at first. Yehudah knew, like everyone in his new circle knew, that his wife would be pregnant before their first anniversary. To be honest, at first he had dreaded the thought. But then he realized that it was Jason—the remnant of the old Jason—who was dreading it, not Yehudah, the new person he had become. Yehudah, the new Yehudah, wanted children, lots of them, knew that children were the greatest blessing. (The old Jason had known that too, but he wasn’t the sort of person who would have admitted it. And certainly not if he had been married less than a year.) And so Yehudah waited for the inevitable. But the months passed—joyfully, days throbbing by as Yehudah remained stunned by the idea of himself as a husband, and even more stunned by this woman who sat in his apartment waiting for him when he came home at night, by her gentle voice that sang out in encouraging him, by her unexpected jokes shared only in private which made him laugh so hard he choked, by the odd change in his own voice when he pronounced the magic words “my wife.” It was a long time before he stopped being amazed long enough to start worrying.