Mostly, Sofia is a middleman; a calming draft prescribed to men who work for the Family when they begin to get nervous. This is something new Joey is trying. He imagines Carlo, and how things might have changed if Carlo could talk to a woman, someone young and professional and pretty who showed him how his job was connected to family, to the earth, without ever directly mentioning those things. Sometimes having a woman in the room can exacerbate tension. But there are many moments when Sofia can put a jumpy man at ease without saying a word.

Sofia doesn’t mind. She is good at this—so good any objections she might have conceived of, objections to being used like a decoration, like the breathing equivalent of a stiff drink, fall to the wayside. She bursts out of bed each morning. When she gets home from her dinners, her drinks, her cappuccino-turned-glass-of-wine, she is bright-eyed and babbling, talking to Saul in tones loud enough to wake Julia, enamored with herself. I changed him, she thinks, she tells Saul, she whispers to herself in the bathroom mirror. I made him different. She doesn’t think about whether she is changing men for the better, or in service of a mission she believes in. It is enough for Sofia that each man’s intention appears to bend and shift as she speaks and moves. At the beginning of 1946 Joey pours her a glass of port and tells her he’s going to have her start taking different meetings, and so when Sofia is not charming flighty Family men and nervous detectives, she is supervising shipments of wine, vinegar, aged and crumbling cheeses, and she is learning to set her mouth so no one asks her questions or gives her any shit, and she is feeling, each day, more and more powerful, more and more connected to the internal beating, not just of her own heart, but of the entire changing world.

With Antonia, Sofia is careful. She knows Antonia doesn’t approve. But she cannot stop working, and she cannot lose Antonia. They are bound together by so much now: their history, their families, their children, who sleep better if they are in the same room as one another. So Sofia’s job is something that she and Antonia step around, examine silently, try to avoid.