“You must be Tamar, ” the woman said, her smile so huge and fake Tamar wanted to scrape it off her face
“Tamar?”
She looked up at the sound of her name. Oh, she’d known they had arrived when the motor had stopped purring. Throughout the ride she had heard every squeak of the brake, felt the car speed up and slow down. But she hadn’t looked. She couldn’t. So she just kept zipping and unzipping the zipper on her wallet for the entire half-hour drive.
“What are you expecting?” Yael Baum had asked from the seat next to her. “Do you want to hear a bit about them?”
Tamar didn’t. She didn’t want to hear about these people or about anything else for that matter. She wanted to open the door in the middle of the highway and run and run and run until she was back in her mother’s embrace. She wanted her friends. Her house. The ability to choose what would happen to her, for goodness’ sake. Anything but to be in this car. So they sat in silence. Until the engine stopped. And with it, so did her heart.
“Are you ready?”
Would she ever be? But she knew Yael for all of two hours, ten minutes, and fifteen seconds, and she was not about to spill her heart out to a stranger. So Tamar followed.
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