Sofia can just sense Robbie, sprinting off into the recesses of the apartment to find Julia. She looks down into Enzo’s liquid brown eyes, his wrinkled face. “Is your mamma okay?” Sofia asks him. Enzo does not answer.

Sofia hears a key in the lock and she hopes it is Saul this time.

And then she hears a door slam.

—

Saul knew showing at dinner would cause a stir but not showing would be an even bigger problem and so he is standing in his front hall, wincing as he brushes his curls away from his eyes, as he shrugs off the trappings of his briefcase, his shoes. The house smells like meat and spices and his mouth waters. He hasn’t eaten in hours.

“Paolo, is that you?” comes Antonia’s voice. “Paolo, I asked you to meet me at the house this afternoon, did you forget?” She is walking toward Saul, who has the impulse to turn toward the wall. Instead he freezes, and so when Antonia turns into the entryway she is face-to-face with Saul, whose eye has been blackened and whose lip has been purpled and swollen. Antonia steps backward in shock. “What happened to you?” she says. Small teardrops of blood litter the front of his shirt. He does not speak. He hasn’t seen himself.

Antonia reaches a hand out and hovers it alongside Saul’s face, afraid to touch him, and unable to stop herself. “Let me get you some ice,” she says.

“Oh, my God.” Sofia is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Enzo in the crook of her elbow. “Oh my God, Saul!”

Saul raises his eyes to meet Sofia’s. “I’m okay,” he says to her.

“What happened to you?” Sofia has dropped a dishtowel, stained with steak juice and tomato and crusted with small fluttering garlic skins, onto the floor.

“Sofia, the kids,” says Antonia. She shepherds Saul into the bedroom. They shut the door. Antonia’s heart has started tapping out a quick jazz on the inside of her rib cage. She and Paolo have attained a tenuous peace. They are polite and gracious toward one another. Paolo promised this morning that he would meet her at their apartment before dinner. He promised they’d take a cab together. He promised she wouldn’t have to shuttle two kids and her own swelled-up self to Sunday dinner by herself. But he never showed. He didn’t answer the phone at his office. And Antonia had to herd Robbie and carry Enzo and ease her aching body into a taxi on her own. She had to choke down a fearful lump, the same one that rises whenever there might be trouble, whenever something might have happened.

Anything, Antonia knows, could happen. She feels stupid to have forgotten that. The moment you stop worrying is the moment trouble begins.