Rebekah doubted it. Mother did not use tears the way some women did—tears weaken a woman and make her a supplicant, and Mother’s other charms worked so well that Rebekah had never seen her resort to crying. Besides, it didn’t sound like the demure weeping of someone doing it for effect. These were deep, heartfelt sobs. Rebekah found it strangely pleasant, to think that her mother would weep like this for her. Pleasant—not distressing. As if she were seeing it from a distance. Something happening to strangers.

These aren’t strangers, these are the people I love most in all the world.

And yet, in her heart, she was already gone. All that foolishness of waiting around for clothing to be made—what was the point? She had already felt it this morning. The sense of detachment. Of having no duties here. Of already being gone.

A month of that? I’d lose my mind, she thought.

Father, seeing that no one was saying anything and that Mother was not likely to be easily comforted, turned to Rebekah and asked, simply, “Will you go with this man?”

“I’ll go,” said Rebekah.

Mother’s weeping stopped almost at once. Proof that it had been a device after all? No—it was a sign of a deeper shock. Mother looked up at her with the face of tragedy. The face that she might have worn when her husband sent her away from her family all those years ago.

Rebekah immediately fell to her knees and embraced her mother, held her tight and close, and whispered in her ear, “I love you, Mother, but this is what I was born for, and it’s my time. We had a year. Thank God for that year.”

“Or curse him,” Mother said—not quietly, “because a year was all we had.”

“It was not the God of Abraham,” said Rebekah, “who cost us the first fifteen years of my life.” Then she kissed her mother to take away the sting of those words . . . though later she would realize that Mother probably assumed she meant that it was Father’s fault, while Rebekah meant to blame it on Asherah.

Rebekah rose from before her mother and embraced Laban. “I hope I have sons as fine and good as the son my parents had,” she said. “I hope they’re as good to each other as you have been to me.” He hugged her back, but said nothing, and when they parted she saw why. He was weeping—silently, but too intensely for him to speak.