Her beloved boy. The girl she gave birth to. Rebekah had never seen her own face—therefore she was the only person in the camp who could not have known how much they looked alike. But the guard last night—he must have taken her for Akyas in the darkness. And all the servants here—how many of them had been with the household longer than Rebekah had been alive? Most of the adults, anyway. They had all known that Rebekah’s mother was not dead. That Father had sent her away, that somewhere in the world she was still alive, even if they had not known exactly where. And not one of them had told her. Not even Milchah, though now it was obvious that it was Father’s marriage to Akyas—to Mother—that she had been speaking about.

As soon as Laban had finished writing Ezbaal’s words, Father turned on him with barely contained fury. “You could have told me who she was when I first broached the matter.”

“You didn’t ask me who she was,” said Ezbaal. “You spoke of her as my sister, and my sister she is, as she has been for more than fourteen years. Akyas is the name you caused her to take.”

“‘Rejected one,’” Laban murmured as he wrote Ezbaal’s words. His stick moved so quickly now that his letters were barely legible and crossed each other haphazardly.

“I gave her no such name,” said Father, when he at last reached those words.

“No, you merely made them true,” said Ezbaal. “Well, do I take it that for the second time, you renounce your vow? For the second time, you send her away? But this time in full view of her children?”

Laban was still writing, but then began to falter, and suddenly he was sitting on the ground, bent over and weeping loudly.

Rebekah could not have named what she felt, but it most certainly did not lead to weeping, not like Laban was doing. She took her stick and wrote savagely in the dirt, “You lied to me.”

Her movement must have been bold enough to draw every gaze, though the only one that mattered was Father’s.

“Yes,” said Father. “I did, and commanded that all the others do it, too. They dared not disobey, even among themselves. Blame no one but me.”

Akyas’s voice came softly from behind her. “All these years I have longed for you, dreamed of you, and now I see that you have grown up better and dearer and with more courage and wisdom than even a mother’s love could imagine.”