Joey sighs. He imagines having a simple daughter, one who didn’t want to break every rule set down before her. “Where are they?”

“Lunch, boss. Chinatown.” There’s a pause. “Do you want me to . . . stop her?”

“Of course not,” says Joey. “Don’t be an idiot. Stay the fuck away from her.” Some of your men are for strategy, he tells himself. Some are not.

“Sorry, boss.”

“I’ll deal with it. Just watch her until she gets in a cab,” says Joey. “Make sure she gets home safe. Make sure she doesn’t see you.”

—

When Joey was a child, he sometimes imagined having a family. The woman he married looked like his mamma, and made the same chicken parmigiana, and hugged him, smelling like flour and roses, when he needed it. His children were small and rowdy, eight or ten of them like bumper cars around him. It was a happy chaos.

In his imagination, Joey never had an adult daughter. He never had any daughters at all. To ten-year-old Joey, there was nothing scarier than a girl. In his imagination, Giuseppe Colicchio certainly never had an out-of-control life-size firebrand threatening to topple his business and family to the ground. And while it’s true that Sofia is the greatest pleasure of Joey’s life, and that in his honest moments he is in awe of her determination, her perseverance, her absolute insistence upon being herself no matter what the circumstances, it is also true that Joey bristles when that determination is turned in his direction.

Joey taps his fingers on his desk in thought. Sofia doesn’t know what she’s doing, and if a goon with two brain cells like Freddie could tail her, so could anyone: your average overachieving newly minted police officer who hasn’t learned better yet, or worse, Eli Leibovich’s men, who are neither stupid nor newly minted, or worse than that, some Fianzo kid, a new guy wanting his bones, hoping to bag Sofia as a bargaining chip. As bragging rights. Sofia insists on risking her own life as well as the safety and security of his entire Family.

Something will have to be done.

—

When Sofia gets home that evening, a sleeping Julia in tow, there is a bouquet of roses waiting for her on the kitchen table and Saul is listening to the radio in the living room. In Paris, victory celebrations are in full swing, it says. Sofia points at the bouquet and raises her eyes at Saul to see if he knows what it is. “There’s a card,” he calls to her. And then, “And the war is over.” The young people are marching up and down the boulevards, singing and dancing and waving flags.

Sofia looks at Saul. “The war is over,” she says. She walks to the table and picks up the envelope there. “It’s open,” she says to Saul.