During the day Sofia cooks with Rosa. She takes walks with Antonia, and they watch as Julia and Robbie toddle in their snowsuits. She wipes counters and folds laundry. Saul works longer days, and comes home from God-knows-where talkative and hungry. He wraps Julia into his arms and tickles her and leans to kiss Sofia, who tries her best to bite her tongue: not to ask the questions that arise like hiccups, involuntary, one after another.

But at night, Sofia lies awake, dissatisfaction like water filling her lungs. She searches for air and finds none.

One crisp night in January, Sofia wakes, shaking and sweaty, and moves to the kitchen as a reflex: further from Saul and Julia, the better to find her way back to her body. Outside, the full moon shines, light like milk pooling down into the crisscross of laundry lines and scraggly backyard trees. Sofia heaves open the window in the kitchen and sticks her face out into the moonlit midnight.

Two weeks later, it happens again. This time, she tiptoes downstairs in her nightgown and stands on the stoop of her building, her hair swimming in the night air, her feet hardening against the frigid stairs.

Sofia has found she is living with hardly any concrete responsibilities, but innumerable unwritten expectations. The strange confined freedom of her new adult life suffocates her and makes her feel desperate, hysterical. She becomes short with Saul and Julia; she avoids Rosa’s eyes. Sofia grows bitter, tasting vinegar at the back of her tongue as she scrubs scum out of the sink. It seems like Saul’s life is moving and hers is settling into a rut. Rosa doesn’t understand: she can’t imagine not being satisfied with a pile of diapers and a child, a child whose overwhelming need for Sofia’s attention, for her time, for her body, threatens to pull the whole house down brick by brick. Sofia holds back tears as she bathes Julia, as she hands a wooden block back and forth while Julia cackles, as she listens to the midday silence of her home while Julia sleeps, as she finds herself, more and more often, alone. She can’t complain to Antonia. Antonia, who she almost lost. Antonia, who had risen to the occasion of motherhood like a phoenix, dusting off her near-death depression; Antonia with her ability to find something bigger in parenting than Sofia can imagine. Sofia has always known Antonia would be a better mother than she would. She has always known that.

It is February of 1945 when Sofia wakes gasping, and instead of standing furtively on the frozen stone steps of her building, folds herself silently into Saul’s desk chair and begins to shuffle through the papers there.