Robbie promised to tell Julia if he learns anything but he goes to bed instead, because he has a small sickening feeling that there is something cracking in his family, some foundational beam that until recently had held them all up, held them together. That night he listens to his papa snoring and pictures himself falling deeper and deeper into his bed with every one of Paolo’s rolling exhales. Deeper and deeper until he falls through the mattress. Robbie sinks through the floor. He buries himself in the ground itself.

—

Spring passes in a flash. Antonia grows. She spends the first truly hot day of summer irritated and alone. She watches Robbie through the front window as he leaves for school and then tries and fails to focus on tidying the house, on balancing the checkbook, on reading, on making a grocery list. She casts tasks aside one by one. She curls into herself like a wave.

Antonia is not surprised when, after a haphazard lunch of toast, her stomach tightens like a vise and she barely makes it to the bathroom in time to throw it up. She is not surprised when she feels a low ache thrumming through her. She calls Lina, but there is no answer. She calls Sofia, who must be working, and then she takes a taxi to the hospital.

—

In Antonia’s twilight dream she is standing at the edge of the ocean. Carlo is a few paces ahead of her. The water swells toward them and then away, like the whole world is being rocked to sleep. Antonia cannot see Carlo’s whole face; it will not come into focus. But she can see the lines on Carlo’s hands, the five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, the way the muscles of his back ripple as he steadies himself against the wind. Papa, she says, I’m scared.

Here, he says, but he doesn’t move. Take this.

Antonia steps forward. The cold water closes over her ankles. When Antonia looks down at her outstretched palms she is holding a pearl-handled gun.

—