I cast my mind back, searching for the moment in which someone had specifically said that Talia Shamir had died in that raid. It didn't take long to determine that there had been no such moment. Michael had never said it, and neither did Mira. What Mira had done was mournfully say Talia's name right after pointing out the man in the picture who had died in the raid. My mind had simply jumped to the conclusion that Talia had died that night too.

Which, I now saw, was a conclusion I should have rejected the moment I'd learned that the Talia in the picture was Michael's wife. For if his wife had died in that raid, Michael would have seen to her body and not driven Esther and Willie to the Klingers.

So why had Mira said that Michael had sacrificed his family for the Irgun?

Without a conscious decision, I found myself approaching Talia's grave, my shoes crunching on the small stones that proliferated the cemetery. As I neared, the inscription on the bottom of her gravestone came into view. Noble of heart and spirit, darling wife of Michael, loving mother of Judah.

It was now beyond doubt. Here lay Michael's dead wife. But what snared my attention were the final three words of the inscription. Mother of Judah.

I had seen no trace of a son in Michael's apartment. It was obvious no child resided there with him. But the inscription told me Michael and Talia had had a son named Judah. Perhaps he was dead, too. Yes. That had to be it.

But there had been no pictures of a child in Michael's apartment. And when I'd talked about the guilt I felt over the deaths of my daughters, Michael had not mentioned that he had also lost a child. Almost as if he didn't want to be reminded that his child had ever existed.

Or didn't want me to know about him.

All of a sudden, a chill spread up my spine, making me shiver and causing the hairs on the back of my neck to stand. My heartbeat jumped to a faster, erratic rhythm. In my mind a dark suspicion began whispering that I had been wrong this whole time, that the truth I had been blind to was too awful to contemplate.

Stop it, I thought, don't get ahead of yourself. Perhaps it was simply too painful for Michael to talk about his son, to see his face every day. I could understand that. Or maybe I just wanted to pretend that I did.

I began walking, scanning headstones, searching for the name Judah Shamir. I wanted to see his grave. I wanted to know when he died. If I knew, maybe the whispering in my head would cease. I walked along one row of graves after another, and after a while the names of the dead began to blur, so I would not have been able to tell the name of the man or woman or child whose headstone I had just read. All I knew for sure was that none of them was Judah Shamir.