Chapter 16 | Given Back
We searched. Torches burned low, their smoke stinging my eyes as I combed the rows, calling until my throat shredded. I scoured the paths to the ravine, the olive grove, even the road that led toward the lake. Nothing. No sound but the hiss of wind through leaves.
By the time the torches guttered, my voice was gone. I sank to my knees in the dirt, pressing my palms into the earth.
“Lord,” I whispered, ragged. “Not him… You gave him to me—I cannot lose him now. And then I whispered over and over: “Sh’mrehu na Elohim.” “Please protect him, O God.” But the night only answered with silence.
I pressed my forehead to the stone and let the cool bite steady me. “El Hanneheg—God who leads—lead him back. “Please let me hear his laugh again.”
I tasted dust and salt and the old metal of fear. A moth battered itself to death against our last lamp and the darkness took the rest.
Baruch’s shout never came. Abba’s staff tapped slower and slower until I sent him inside. I walked the lower wall again, then the upper, then the lane where the thyme grows out of the seams and smells like memory when it’s crushed.
Eventually, dawn’s first gray unstitched the sky.
My legs shook as I staggered back toward the house, dust streaking my skirt, eyes burning with exhaustion.
And then—I saw movement at the gate.
I froze.
It was James. His broad shoulders filled the morning light, and at his side walked Lavi. The boy’s tunic was torn, streaked dark with dried blood—but he walked. Whole. Breathing.
“Lavi!” I ran, gathering him into my arms so tightly he squeaked. Tears blurred my vision as I kissed his hair. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
James’s voice came over my tears. “He ran into the road. A cart struck him—hard. They thought he wouldn’t live.”
He swallowed. “But Jesus was nearby. They carried the boy to Him, broken and bleeding. And He healed him. Bones, flesh, all of it.”
I clutched Lavi tighter, my whole body trembling. “Thank you,” I whispered, looking up at James with my hands empty of anything but relief.
He shook his head. “Don’t thank me. Thank Jesus.”
I wet my lips. “I… I don’t believe it.” Even as I said the words, a small prickling rose at the back of my skull—an unwelcome spark I couldn’t snuff out.
It needled me: what if?
I pushed it down. “It sounds like a story,” I added, quieter. “A trick, maybe.” The last words wavered.
“I saw it, Talia.”
“He was…” James dragged a hand through his hair, searching for the word. “Crushed.”
He said it carefully, aware the wrong tone might shatter something fragile—in Lavi… or me.
I flinched at the word.
“His chest—” James swallowed, saying it close to my ear so that Lavi might not hear. “It was caved in. His leg bent where no leg should bend. There was so much blood.” His voice roughened. “And he was pale, like the life had already left him.”
My arms tightened instinctively around Lavi.
“They thought he wouldn’t live,” James continued, quieter now. “Men were shouting. Someone said to move him. Someone else said don’t. And then—” He stopped, voice catching once, like even now the memory overwhelmed him.
“And then they brought him to Jesus, and He simply touched him.”
James’s eyes lifted to mine, and there was no challenge or smugness. Only a fierce, unshaken certainty.
“I watched it happen,” he said. “Bone set. Flesh closed. Color returned. Like it had never been broken at all.”
He exhaled slowly.
“Whole.”
I let out a small groan. Still refusing it. “That isn’t how the body works.”
His jaw tightened, and when he spoke again, his voice was low. “You weren’t there.”
A pause.
And softer still: “One day, you will be.”
I tore my gaze away, holding Lavi as though he might vanish again. “I’ll believe the Law. The Lord who gave it. That’s enough.”
James studied me a moment longer, then inclined his head. “Then I’ll leave you to Him.” His voice softened. “And to the boy who’s been given back to you.”
He turned, his figure disappearing down the road.
“James—wait.”
The word caught, but he paused and half-turned, morning light along his shoulder.
“Thank you,” I said, the truth of it pulling my voice low. “For bringing him back to me.”
He gave a small nod—no swagger, only relief. “You’re welcome.” Then he lifted a hand in parting. “Shalom, Talia.” And walked on.
“Shalom,” I said after him, weakly—feeling he’d taken my doubt for ingratitude.
The courtyard swayed. I sat because my knees failed me, pulling Lavi into my lap like I used to when he first showed up and would only sleep with his ear on my heart. My hands moved over his face—temple, cheekbone, chin—taking inventory, confirming: whole. Whole. Whole.
When we went inside, I drew Lavi down onto the bench, brushing his curls back from his forehead. “Tell me what happened,” I urged.
His eyes clouded. He shook his head slowly. “I… I don’t remember. I remember the cart, the pain, and then… nothing. Until I woke up. And saw his face.”
“James?” I asked.
“No, Jesus.” He replied, smiling up at me.
I swallowed hard, searching his face. No answers there—only innocence, only trust. I kissed his temple and pulled him close, though questions gathered, heavy and unanswered.
He was safe. He was whole. And yet… The echo of James’s words pressed in around me. The teacher had healed him.
I shoved it away, burying my face in Lavi’s hair. I would not be swayed by wandering preachers and fishermen’s tales.
And yet… the boy in my arms breathed strong and sure, as though death had passed him by.
I laid him down and washed the dried blood from his hair with water warmed over the coals. He winced once, then sighed the way children do when sleep takes their fear with it. When he slept, I went to the doorway. Baruch stood at the threshold, planted there as its keeper.
“We found no sign by the ravine,” he said, voice hushed by the sleeping house. “I followed the road. Saw the cart tracks at the bend and the place where he’d bled. It wasn’t everywhere. But it was more than a body should lose and still rise.”
I nodded, unable to say thank you without breaking apart.
He drew something from his belt—a tiny bell on a leather thong.
“He made it for Penelope,” he said, setting it on the bench beside the door.
“I kept it because… I don’t know why. Maybe to remind myself to be gentler with the things boys love. ”
“I misjudged you,” I said, and my voice didn’t tremble on the way out, which felt like a mercy. “I saw edges and called them knives.”
He gave a humorless huff. “I have edges.” He looked toward Lavi. “But for him, I’ll sand them when I can.”
We stood like that, almost companionable in our awkwardness. When he finally went, he moved down the steps lighter than I had ever seen him.
I took the little bell in my hand. It made a strangled sound, like laughter remembered badly. I tied it to a nail by the door where Lavi could see it when he woke, proof that sorrow and kindness sometimes wear the same face.
~
Morning came thin and gray, slipping into the house without ceremony. I found the tunic folded where I had left it, stiff with dried blood. I lifted it carefully, the memory of his pain still clinging to it.
The tear ran from shoulder to waist—ragged, uneven. Not cut. Ripped. I traced it with my fingers, counting the stains, weighing the darkened cloth in my hands. Too much blood for a fall. Too much for a scrape.
I tried to reason it out. A cart wheel. Iron and wood meeting flesh.
I thought of the bend in the road James had named, where carts picked up speed.
I pictured bone under weight, the sound of a body failing to remain whole.
My stomach turned, and I bowed my head, chest tight, refusing the image before it finished forming.
If he had truly been struck, there would have been more. Broken ribs. A wound that lingered.
The tear was jagged—not clean like a blade.
Why would James lie?
I set the tunic aside, my hands unsteady now. Panic makes stories grow, I told myself. Men embellish what frightens them.
Or could it be worse?
Whispers stirred at the edges of my thoughts—of forbidden power, of healers who crossed lines the Law had drawn. My jaw tightened. The Law was clear.
I crossed the room and knelt beside Lavi.
He slept on his side, one arm flung above his head, breathing deep and even. I lifted his shirt slowly, bracing myself. My hand skimmed his ribs, his stomach, his chest—warm, smooth, whole. No swelling. No tenderness. I pressed gently where pain should have lived.
Nothing.
He stirred. “Talia?”
“I’m here,” I said quickly. “Did I wake you?”
He shook his head, eyes heavy.
“You don’t remember?” I asked. “Truly?”
“No,” he said after a moment. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” I told him, smoothing his curls back.
“I’m sorry,” he started softly. “About everything—”
“Shhh,” I murmured, cutting him off gently. “None of that matters now, my boy. All that matters is that you are safe.”
I kissed the top of his head and held him against my chest. He watched me with a steadiness I wasn’t used to. I saw then what I had not allowed myself to see before—his face longer, his limbs no longer boyish. He had grown overnight, it seemed.
“You look…” I faltered, then shook my head. “What do you think happened?”
“Promise you won’t be angry?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
He inhaled deeply, and then spoke.
“I believe Jesus healed me,” he said. He pressed his fist to his chest. “I know it. And I know He’s the Messiah.”
“No—” I began, instinct sharp and ready.
He lifted his hand. “Please. I’m not finished.”
I closed my mouth. Shocked by his resolve.
“I asked Him about the Law,” Lavi went on. “I asked if He was breaking it.”
I tilted my head, listening.
“He smiled,” Lavi said. “Not like I was foolish. Like He was glad I asked. He said the Law is a fence that keeps us from falling—but it was never meant to keep us from reaching what’s inside.”
He looked at me carefully. “He said love is how you know when to open the gate.”
The room tilted.
I heard another voice then—gentle, soft, long buried. God gave us the Law to teach us love, not to keep us from it. I saw my ima’s hands, gentle and kind, binding a stranger’s wound while my Uncle Eleazar, watched and warned: A fence should always have a gate.
My throat closed.
Lavi shifted closer. “I think He was really talking to you,” he added softly, then winced. “Not in a bad way.”
I swallowed. “My ima,” I said before I could stop myself. “She said something like that once.”
His eyes lit. “Then she would have liked Him.”
I did not answer.
Outside, the morning had fully come. And with it, something else—uninvited, unannounced, and impossible to send away.
Later, when Abba rose and touched Lavi’s hair with the reverence reserved for holy things, I lit the morning lamp and whispered a blessing I didn’t fully understand. “Toda, Adonai—for life returned. And if this is Your doing, and not men’s tales, then teach me what to do with that.”
I swept the floor. I cut bread and salted olives and set them by Lavi’s mat. I kept the Law because it was the fence that has held me when the ground has moved under my feet.
And yet, all afternoon, the house held an odd quiet, the kind that hums right under the skin of things. The boy in my care was alive and well. And I could not keep from imagining a pair of hands—calloused like a carpenter’s—resting for a moment on a blood-wet and broken body—and making it clean.