But mostly, when she goes to Antonia’s, Sofia is cheerful, as cheerful as she can manage. She tells Antonia about Julia’s new facial expressions, about Joey’s new hire, who is, Tonia, you’ll never guess, remember Marco DeLuca? another neighborhood boy sucked into the inescapable vacuum of Family, and unbeknownst to Sofia, Marco has been hired to help Paolo, whose forgery business has evolved to include a print shop in Gowanus, a dressmaker on Thirty-Eighth, a warehouse of school supplies in Greenpoint, and who needs help running errands and managing his workload. All Sofia knows is Marco has turned up at Sunday dinner with a bottle of wine and his best shirt on; that he doffs his cap to Sofia’s father the way he should; that he is possessed of a bigger, stronger body than Sofia would have imagined, given that her most salient memory of him is herself standing over his prone frame on the floor of their kindergarten classroom.

Antonia remembers Marco DeLuca. She remembers the wholeness of her own body, when she knew him. She remembers the day Sofia tripped him. Marco’s face, horror-struck as he tried to reconcile the world he thought he knew with the unfamiliar and dangerous reality where a girl might hurt him, send him tumbling over his own feet, turn him upside down, break his tooth off at the root. And Antonia understands. She, too, is living through a nightmare in a world she thought she chose.

—

At night, Sofia prays. She doesn’t ever remember praying before but it comes out of her like a flood. Every bit of restless and flammable energy Sofia has ever had, focused. Please, she prays. Give her back to me. She prays as she sanitizes Julia’s bottles, as she waves to Saul when he leaves for work.

Prayer is an acknowledgment of fear, of that which cannot be controlled or contained or even understood. It is a surrender and an attack, all at once. Please, Sofia prays, thinking about Antonia, the darkness in her expression, the lifelessness in her breath. I can’t do this without you.

But during the day Sofia understands that it is her job to fill Antonia’s home with light, with space, with sun, and so she opens the shades and does not fall at Antonia’s bedside to beg. She brings books; she turns the radio on so softly Antonia does not notice she is listening to something other than Robbie’s disconsolate wails. She wipes the kitchen counters, humming like Rosa.