“Shmuel,” she said, holding his arm, “is everything okay?”

He nodded.

“Something’s bothering you.”

“I’m fine, Eema. I’m just tired.”

“Okay,” said Rina, disconcerted at his evasion.

He gave his mother another hug, then trudged off to the bedroom.

“What happened?” she asked Peter as soon as they were alone.

“Could I have a cup of coffee, Rina?”

“Uh…sure. Of course,” she said. “Sit down, Peter. You look exhausted.”

He took a seat on the left side of her brown sofa, letting his head flop back against the cushion, then ran his hands over his face.

“Why are the boys upset?” she asked.

“It’s complicated. But everyone’s fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “Relax. I’ll make coffee and then you can tell me what’s going on.”

Her house was tiny—800 square feet crammed with mementos—tchatchkas, she called them. Display cases full of Jewish figurines, propped photos, and sketches of Israel. The white walls were dotted with landscapes of the Judean dessert, charcoals of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall, and photos of the Lower East Side of New York. Hanging above the sofa was a magnificently colored and elaborately scrolled Hebrew document—her wedding contract, her ketubah.

That’s what a Jewish marriage is, she had said. A contract. You’re supposed to know what you’re getting yourself into.

But do you ever really know, he had wondered out loud.

Emotionally, of course not. But a ketubah spells out the specific obligations for a husband as well as a wife. You’ve got to remember that back then, most societies considered women things—objects. The idea that a man was accountable to his wife was revolutionary.

Her entire east wall was the family gallery—snapshots of her parents, and her brothers and their families, pictures of her sons as infants and toddlers clumsy in bulky diapers, and antique sepia portraits of her grandparents and great-grandparents in gilt frames. And the wedding pictures—Rina and Yitzchak under a canopy holding a shared wine glass. The groom was looking directly at the rabbi, his eyes intense and serious. He’d been a handsome young man, Decker thought, lean, with even, strong features. But Rina was the focus of the photograph—a stunningly beautiful girl with sapphire eyes and gleaming ebony hair that fell to her waist. She was dazzling as a bride. Whenever he looked at the picture, he felt a twinge in his chest.

His eyes drifted from the photo to the overflowing bookcases. She owned some secular books, but most were religious—Hebrew and Aramaic books of prayer, law, and ethics that were double and triple stacked on the shelves. She had skimmed through some of them, she had told him, but Yitzchak had known them all by heart.