“A little. You know, if your father had bothered to tell me he was expecting someone, I’d have made my zaeti. He really only has himself to blame,” Marta grumbled.

Delicious as the zaeti were, Marta couldn’t possibly have made the cookies. There was hardly any flour in the pantry, no raisins, barely enough sugar to sweeten the coffee, and they hadn’t seen a fresh egg in months. But pointing it out would only lead to more sighs.

Instead, Antonina washed out the pot and set about grinding the barest handful of beans, so precious and rare they might as well have been gilded. There was just enough in the little drawer of the grinder, once she’d chased out every clinging speck, to make two small cups of coffee, hardly more than a mouthful each. She’d reuse the grounds for herself and Marta, for even watered-down coffee tasted better than the caffè d’orzo made of roasted barley that some told themselves was as good as the real thing.

It was enough, for now, to smell the coffee as it brewed, as she divided it between the prettily decorated porcelain cups her parents had bought in Florence on their honeymoon, as she set them and the sugar bowl on a tray and hurried back to her father’s study. The smell was the best thing about coffee, after all. And it was only so tantalizing because she was hungry. Once she’d had her supper she wouldn’t notice it as much.

The men were so intent on their conversation they didn’t look up when she entered, and it would never do to interrupt. So she went about sugaring the coffee, setting the cups at their elbows, and taking her seat at a twin of her mother’s chair at the casa.

Her father spared her a smile, and he drank down his coffee appreciatively, but his attention remained fixed on his friend.

“This city, these few islands, are the nearest thing we Jews have to a promised land in Europe. We have lived here unmolested for centuries, yet you suggest that we abandon it. And for what?” her father asked, his voice rising. “The dubious welcome the Spanish might offer us? A panicked trek through the mountains before the Swiss turn us back?”

“If you had listened to me when they first barred you from your work, from your profession—”

“I belong nowhere else. I am as Italian as you. I was born here. I have no other home. What would become of me—of my family? Of my patients? And the fascists have made no move against us beyond the racial laws.”