He leapt to her side as she dropped the knife and grabbed her bleeding hand in his own fist. She bent her head down over the tiny wound, unworthy of her scream, and they both stood still for a moment staring at her hand, watching as the little stream of blood slowed to a stop. But when she looked up, he gasped. Her face, bright red, was crumpled and streaked with tears—not the tears of a woman who had cut her finger, but larger tears, older tears. Then she started babbling, a torrent of words flowing from her mouth like a river swollen and roaring with waters from a rainstorm, about how she had been ill as a child, not just ill but fatally ill, how the doctors, dozens of doctors, had told her parents that she would almost certainly die. She didn’t die, in the end; she spent months in and out of the hospital, and to everyone’s shock a miracle occurred and she was rescued. But the illness had done its damage: she escaped with her life, but not with anyone else’s. The doctors told her parents that she would almost definitely never be able to have children. For the past six months, she had been seeing a fertility specialist, but nothing had worked. She was sorry. So sorry.

Yehudah listened, bewildered. For a moment he couldn’t speak at all, the words he wanted to say caught under his tongue. At last he opened his lips, seared by the pressure and fire of her voice.

“And you never told me any of this,” he said evenly, controlling his rage. “We’ve been married all this time and you never told me any of this.”

Rivka avoided his eyes. “No, I never told you.”

Yehudah lost it. He shouted at her, in a way he hadn’t shouted in years, at the top of his lungs: “Why the hell not?”

Rivka stood facing him, pinching her wounded finger. Even reduced to tears, she looked to him as if she were holding up the sky. “Because I thought—” she began, but quickly resumed choking back sobs.

His imagination completed the sentence for her. I thought you would never find out. I thought I could handle it myself. I thought I shouldn’t bother you about it. I thought you didn’t want children now anyway.

She tried again. “I thought—”

His imagination kept filling in the blank. I thought you didn’t want a pregnant wife. I thought it might get better on its own. I thought it might not get better on its own. I thought you wouldn’t care. I thought you would care. I thought it didn’t matter.