After a few weeks of watching and listening to her this way, testing her clarity and cut, Yehudah went on the offensive. He searched the bedroom and bathroom drawers, knowing—in a way that would shock her if she knew—exactly what each of the several things he was looking for looked like. He racked his brain trying to remember where the last six girls had kept these things, hoping against both reality and logic that at least one of them had something in common with Rivka. The medicine cabinet was too obvious. Kim, Liz, and Katie had kept theirs in bedroom drawers, but never the same drawer. Katie hid hers inside a pair of socks, which he in his high school panic had thought too easy to discover. Liz, bolder and with hippie parents who didn’t care, kept hers in a drawer full of what she called “important things,” the majority of which seemed to be movie ticket stubs. (Movies she had seen with her old boyfriend Chris, mostly. That had pissed him off.) Kim kept hers next to the tampons, or sometimes right on top of her dorm room dresser, her underhanded way of bragging to her roommates. The memory repulsed him.

But Rivka, Yehudah reasoned, would need to be subtle. One day when Rivka was out visiting her sister, Yehudah came home early and turned the entire tiny apartment upside down, looking inside every pocket of every skirt, under every fold of every towel, behind and between the books that crammed their floor-to-ceiling shelves. After she came home, while she cooked, he even checked inside her wallet. Nothing. Yet there were things a doctor could prescribe that he wouldn’t even know about, lots of things, things he hadn’t even thought about since his high school health class. Perhaps Rivka had hidden secrets, things girls kept not in drawers, but somewhere inside themselves. Maybe even now she was cruising about among their family and friends, smiling her unnerving smile and pretending that nothing was wrong when people asked. Which meant, by implication—Yehudah instantly realized—that there was something wrong with him. The thought burned him in horror. Was there? The next day he went in to work and listened intently to Abramo-vitch talking on the phone at his desk, imagining that his clear, professional voice was actually a fabricated accent, a decoy voice speaking in code, confirming yes, that’s right, we are not affiliated with that store, yes, indeed, I have your order right in front of me, while what he really meant was, yes, that’s right, you are not what you thought you were—and yes, indeed, I know it.