Saul shakes his head. Sofia can do this: half asleep, she can make it so that he doesn’t even remember whether she lied or not. “You just told me he disappeared,” he says. “You didn’t tell me why.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I guess I was protecting her.”

“You were protecting Joey,” Saul says, more bitterness than he intended stealing into his voice.

“He’s my father,” says Sofia.

“How can we keep doing this?” asks Saul.

“Doing what?” And as Sofia squints through dry midnight eyes at Saul, a familiar sense of purpose steals over her like silk. Sofia Colicchio, talking a nervous Family man down.

“He wanted to leave, so they killed him? They left his daughter and his wife alone? How did Antonia marry Paolo, knowing what happened to her papa? How can you work for Joey? How can I?” Saul’s whisper gets louder as he talks. It’s inconceivable, to be in a world that is so very tangled up.

“Shh,” says Sofia. “Julia and Robbie will hear you.” She pauses. She is good at this when she is talking to a stranger, but she doesn’t think Saul will be impressed by her batting eyelashes, her honeyed voice. She has no choice but to tell him what she really thinks. “I don’t have the answers to all of your questions. When you say it like that, it doesn’t make sense, does it? And you know how many questions I have. You know I can’t ever keep my mouth shut. This ‘don’t talk about it’ thing that my parents do—that my mamma always did—that doesn’t work for me.”

“So how can you—” begins Saul, but Sofia shakes her head.

“Family isn’t so simple,” says Sofia, and Saul can hear his mother’s voice, telling him that God isn’t so simple, and he can taste the darkened mildewed air in the ship on the way to America. “I used to think my papa was a god. And then eventually, I began to understand more of what went on, and I was so angry. Antonia’s papa—Carlo was his name, Uncle Carlo—had disappeared, and we were all pretending like everything was fine, like it hadn’t happened. I was angry at my parents all the time; I was angry at Antonia, even, angry at her for being okay when something so wrong had happened. And then you came, and it was like I learned that violence and war can result in something good, in love, even, which I think is what I had been learning my whole life.”

“So it’s my fault?” Saul finds himself angry. His whisper becomes a hiss. “I barely escaped a war with my life and you’re telling me that’s why you understand the value of violence? You would have left if not for me?”