Paolo and Saul arrive each day after work, whenever they finish, so that Saul can take Sofia and Julia home. Each day Paolo asks Sofia, is she better? as though Antonia is broken, when nothing is wrong with Antonia. She is not broken; she is lost. Sofia runs out of ways to tell Paolo this, and it is one of the reasons she is grateful for Saul: he does not ask for progress to be chopped up into measurable pieces. There are moments she’s there, Sofia tells Saul. She’ll laugh, or she’ll go for Robbie before I do when he cries. And then the next moment—Sofia stops, because she is describing Saul too: the way his sadness can settle over him like a coat for a few days and then pass.

Saul understands. His mother hasn’t written in over a year. And he has faith that the light of Sofia will be as much a balm to Antonia as it is to him. He slings an arm around Sofia and leans, as they walk, to kiss the top of Julia’s head. And then he falls quiet, wondering about the language of Antonia’s trauma. Wondering whether it is the same language he can speak so well. And wondering, though he is grateful every day for Sofia’s relentless heat, what it would be like to sit with someone who understood.

—

One morning in February, Antonia wakes early from a dream of playing dress-up underwater with Sofia. Their hair and clothes floated around them and when Antonia looked down at her fingers she realized she was a child. She reached her hands out for Sofia and the two of them leaned away from one another, the circle of their arms holding them as they began to spin up toward the sun.

Paolo and Robbie are sleeping. It is dark; only the faintest purpling of the light in their bedroom tells Antonia it is almost dawn. She pads into the living room and hears, as if for the first time that winter, the whisper of the radiator against the cold outside. She sits on the couch. She thinks about Sofia, who has come every day all winter to tell Antonia you exist, you are here, you are in your body, you are in the world. Sofia, who has her own new baby to take care of, her own marriage, but who has spent months with Antonia, watering her like a plant, waiting for her.

Antonia stifles a sob. She stifles a thousand sobs a day. But this one turns into a hiccup. A strange cough. A sound wants to come from the center of Antonia. She buries her face in a pillow.