Recap: There was a bomb scare on campus and the place where Ruchama had left her backpack with the article in it was cordoned off and she couldn’t retrieve it. Later, the backpack is brought to her and she puts her hand inside to get the article but it’s gone. It was her only copy of the article, as her computer had died.

This was like a crazy nightmare. I kept trying to think of what Ella had said earlier. Everything happens for a reason. Hashem is in charge.

I knew I’d put the paper in my backpack. How could it just disappear?

Meanwhile, Ella had rushed to meet her chasan who was due in the airport. She told me not to despair. Everything would work out.

I hoped she was right.

My head was starting to pound.

There was nothing else I could do. I went home and recited t’hilim. I tried not to feel discouraged, but it was so frustrating.

I was ready to go to sleep when the doorbell rang. Ella and her chasan burst into the room. “Come see what we found,” Ella said.

She opened a bag filled with some photographs and proceeded to lay them out on our dining room table.

They were shots I’d taken of the bell tower in all different angles before the JIS event. In two of the photos, there was a person crouched behind the tower. It was Vivian. In one shot she was looking in my back pack.

In the next shot, she was holding some papers.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We go to the police,” Ella said. “She may have made that whole bomb scare to get the article.”

I called Mrs. Schwerner and told her what Ella had found. Mrs. Schwerner said that she and Rabbi Hartstein would meet us at the police station.

The police filed a report and then two cars set off to find Vivian Killen and hopefully my article.

Four hours later, tears spilled from my eyes. Once again, my paper was in my hands.

Vivian was brought into the police station for questioning for creating a bomb scare.

I handed Mrs. Schwerner the paper. She planned to make two copies and then fax it to the editor.

…

Later that night, before I went to sleep, I thought of all the things I had to be grateful for. Hashem had helped me every step of the way. I got my paper back. He helped me write the paper. I met Mrs. Schwerner and Rabbi Hartstein – and my new friend Ella.

The next day, I drove Mrs. Schwerner to the airport. “Ruchama, you are a talented writer. You wrote the truth and I am so grateful to you.”

I handed her Yonah’s journal. I felt sad to part with it. My life had changed so much from the lessons contained in its yellowed pages.

“Thank you. It’s very precious to me,” she said, as she stepped out of the car. She turned to me with a smile. “I was speaking with Rabbi Hartstein, and his son Michael Aryeh is in shidduchim. We both thought you might be a shidduch for his son.”

“The son named for your husband and Andy Goodman?”

She nodded. “He’s a super learner. He’s learning in a top yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael. He wants to learn full time as long as possible and then go into chinuch.”

 My heart began to pound. “Oh, wow. I was planning to start in shidduchim around winter break.”

“We’ll be in touch then!”

As Mrs. Schwerner disappeared into the terminal, I thought about my health problem. Would he still want to date me?

To be continued…

Susie Garber is the author of Denver Dreams, a novel (Jerusalem Publications, 2009), Memorable Characters…Magnificent Stories (Scholastic, 2002), Befriend (Menucha Publishers, 2013), The Road Less Traveled (Feldheim, 2015), fiction serials and features in various magazines including A Bridge in Time, historical fiction serial (Binyan Magazine, 2017). She writes the community column for The Queens Jewish Link and she writes freelance for Hamodia. She works as a writing consultant in many yeshivahs and she teaches creative writing to students of all ages.