At the thought of Deborah, she turned to see the dear simple soul standing there with tears streaming down her cheeks. Rebekah walked to her, put her arms around her.

“Everybody’s mad,” said Deborah, “and I don’t know why.”

“This is my mother,” said Rebekah. “She isn’t dead after all.”

“But . . . where were you?” Deborah asked Akyas.

Before Akyas could make any kind of answer, Rebekah turned to Father and spoke to him—as if he could hear her, and perhaps, without knowing the exact words, he could read her face. “Yes, Father. Where was she?”

Rebekah leaned her head on Deborah’s shoulder—for Deborah was still half a hand taller than Rebekah and probably always would be, judging from Akyas’s height. “But then, I did have a mother,” she said. “It was no fault of yours, Akyas, but this is the woman who fed me and washed me and dressed me and dried my tears and taught me to be kind and fair and . . . honest. I wondered about you, but I didn’t miss you the way Laban seems to have, because I had Deborah.”

“Pillel!” shouted Father. “Come and write down what everybody’s saying!”

“I had a mother,” said Rebekah. “But now I wonder what I’m going to do for a father. Because the old one turns out to be a liar who took my mother away from me in my infancy and never had the courage to tell me what he did!”

Though he hadn’t heard her, the anguish in Father’s face told her that he understood the kind of thing she was saying. She turned to Akyas, who looked scarcely less upset than Father. “As for you, I know you truly love me, because you went to such great lengths to make sure that I found all this out here, today, with all these people looking on. What a fine story this will make, told around every campfire between Hurria and Egypt.”

She stepped forward to meet Ezbaal’s gaze—Ezbaal, who still seemed quite pleased with himself. “As for you, I thank God I was saved from marrying the kind of man who would set up such a cruel joke as this, played on two children who never did you any harm. How proud you’ll be to tell about this jest to all your friends.”

Ezbaal’s face grew suddenly grave. “I was thinking only of reuniting your father and mother. It was not a jest. And the story will not be told to anyone, not by me or any man of mine.”

Pillel was writing for Father now. “No one will speak of this,” Father said determinedly.