She paused for a moment, waiting this time for her sobs to subside. He waited with her. When her breathing at last smoothed itself out, she said, with astounding, cutting clarity, “I thought that if I told you, you wouldn’t want me anymore.”

Yehudah stared at her in shock.

“But Rivka, why would I ever not want you?” he asked. He felt his own voice slicing through the air like a jeweler’s precision saw, polishing the unfinished edges and rough deceit out of the space between them until it suddenly emerged, shining, the perfect cut.

“How could I ever not want you, Rivka? Rivka, I love you!”

He had said it before, many times, to many people. But that was the first time he knew what it meant to mean it.

“I MEAN it when I tell you how helpful you’ve been,” Jake said as he took out his checkbook. “I really appreciate your honesty.” The chosen one, the yet-unset, stunningly cut, I-color, VS2, .78 carat diamond lay on the table in front of him, ready for him to retrieve it in its clean, simple, shining setting the following week after the check had cleared. In his mind it was already on her finger.

Yehudah passed him a pen. “Well, if you get it appraised somewhere and there’s a problem, just let me know. She’s going to love it, I’m sure. You’ve picked a winner.”

“I know, thanks to you.”

Jake signed his name across the bottom of the check, feeling ennobled by the size of the figure above it. As he glanced at his signature, he felt as if he had just signed a marriage contract, written in fire on a glowing coal buried miles beneath the ground, that Leora would only discover in time after it had turned into the most glorious gem—one burning with blinding clarity, wed by brilliance and fire.

The two men stood up and shook hands again. Jake left the office, singing his goodbye to Peter the security guard as he strolled out of the building. Yehudah went back to the vault, with a lightness in his step as he began putting away the unwanted stones. And both men smiled to themselves for the rest of the day, each believing, in the hardened believing of coal burned solid deep below the surface of the earth, that he had gotten the better deal.

Chapter 9 Floodgates

CHAPTER 9

FLOODGATES

THE DOLLHOUSE PEOPLE are waiting. They have been waiting silently for many years, but only now has their waiting become real, waiting for something in particular rather than simply waiting. They are waiting for Leora to come home.