The thought first occurred to him one day at work, when a customer, shopping for an engagement ring—most of their clients were retailers, but once in a while they did have people come in on referral, looking for a single stone—had come in carrying a baby. Whose baby was it? A sister’s? A friend’s? His own, from an ex-wife? From a dead wife? From the woman he would surprise later that week with a diamond ring? Yehudah didn’t ask, keeping the conversation carefully clipped. But as he stood on the subway that night, trying not to watch the man and woman his own age who were wrapped together around the subway pole three feet away, he found the question floating in his mouth, words written on a scroll under his tongue in a forgotten language:

“Rivka, do you want to have children?”

It was a ridiculous question. Not if Jason had asked it, but from Yehudah it was like asking whether man had been created in the divine image—something so obvious that no one bothered to think about it. Yet for the past few months Yehudah had begun wondering the unwonderable. Maybe, just maybe, Rivka didn’t believe in the divine image, and didn’t want to replicate it either. Maybe it was all her fault.

“Rivka, do you want to have children?”

Yehudah started to suspect. He began examining everything Rivka said and did, like a jealous man who believes his wife is sleeping with other men behind his back. He picked up each word that emerged from her mouth, particularly when she jabbered in fluent baby talk to her nieces and nephews, and held it gingerly in his mind like a jeweler holding a loose stone in a pair of tightened tongs, appraising it through the loupe of his brain for the slightest flaw. The tiniest inclusion in her speech or gestures—her strange smile upon hearing about her sister’s fourth pregnancy, the intense concentration she suddenly bestowed upon her steaming vegetables when he made some joke about their own future children, the narrowed eyes she used for watching the neighbor’s kids waiting for the elevator as if she were their mother—gave him reason to downgrade her to a more flawed, lower class of gem. There was a possibility, one that grew more and more distinct in his mind each day, that he had overvalued her.