“But suddenly, today, the war is over. I am fighting against nothing. I’m escaping nothing. And you are—like you always do, you are just blasting into your life like dynamite through concrete. And suddenly I am here, and there’s no reason for it. I could be anywhere now.” Saul sits back into the sofa and feels himself sinking. Blessed are You. “I am on an absolute island, Sofia.”

Over the course of their time together, Saul softens Sofia. It is one of the most monumental changes in her. She becomes the mistress of her own emotional topography. She learns to pause, to take in all the information. She can still react with fire, with tornado. But she is now able to control it. To sharpen it. To aim.

It is this softness and this aim which now compel Sofia to drop herself into Saul’s lap and fill her arms with him, with his shoulders and the desperate hollow of his chest, with the brown curls that spring from his head. She fills her nose with his scent, with the spice of his aftershave and the yellow stench of cigarettes and sweat that collects in his shirt after he’s been wearing it all day. And then Sofia fills her mouth with Saul, with his mouth and his breath, until the only sound in their apartment is an exhale, a collapse, and Sofia does not whisper I need you here but she feels need squeezing her like a muscle and she believes Saul does too.

—

Over the next week, Sofia meets with Joey alone several times. He pours her a glass of wine and shuts the parlor doors behind them. He sits, spread-kneed across from her, and he says, it’s time you learned some things about how this works.

—