Rebekah lay down on her bed and stared upward into the darkness above her. Everything had worked out after all. She had figured out a way to serve God and still keep the family safe and Father happy. The curse of being pretty and having a rich father wasn’t so bad if you were also smart enough to figure things out.

She was just dozing off with these thoughts spinning in her mind when all at once she realized what she was actually saying. At once she leapt from her bed and knelt in the tent, looking upward toward heaven. “Oh Lord,” she said, softly and miserably, “is there anyone more foolish and ungrateful than I am? All this was thy doing, and not my own at all. Thou gavest me the courage to say no to the marriage, and thou didst soften the hearts of my father and Pillel so they could hear me. Surely the plan that came into my mind was also thy gift, and here I was being proud that I was so clever. Forgive my unworthiness, Lord, forgive me and please, please keep making things work out right. Please make it so Ezbaal doesn’t get angry, and please don’t make Father marry Akyas if she would be awful to him or something. Because if somebody has to be unhappy, let it be me, and not Father.”

She wasn’t sure if her prayer made up for her vanity a moment before, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she lay back down and, after a while, slept.

Part II

Unveiled

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Rebekah was surprised how Father fretted about the wedding, constantly finding some pretext to summon her to his tent to ask the same questions, over and over.

“I don’t expect her to be pretty,” Father said for the fifth or tenth or twentieth time. “I’m not a boy and she’s not a girl. But why won’t they let me see her?”

Rebekah didn’t even bother to answer anymore. There was no point in scratching the same letters into the dirt. Laban joked that they ought to have engraved all their commiserations in stone and then simply pointed to the appropriate phrases. “It would have saved time.”

“And when it’s time for your wedding,” Rebekah added, “we could reuse them.”

“I’m not going to marry some girl I’ve never seen,” said Laban.

“Oh, I know,” said Rebekah. “But of course we can’t let her see you in advance.”

“That’s not fair,” Laban said. “Father says I can’t beat you with a stick, and anything less won’t make an impression.”

But with Father there was no joking. “If she’s not ugly or scarred or deformed, why keep her veiled until the wedding?”