And if there is trouble, she wants to look Paolo in the eyes while he tells her. Antonia expands outside herself, feeling out for her family, counting Robbie with Julia in her room, Enzo with his half-mast sleepy eyes in Sofia’s arms. Robbie and Enzo are here. Where is Paolo. The beat inside Antonia’s body quickens.

Antonia takes Enzo from Sofia and slips out of the bedroom to get ice and Saul sits heavily on his bed. Sofia kneels on the floor in front of him to look at his face and says in a low voice, “Tell me what happened.”

And Saul raises his eyes to meet Sofia’s and says, “I can’t.”

Sofia laughs. Her husband has come home bleeding and beaten. He will tell her why. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Sofia’s hands are framing the sides of Saul’s face. Saul reaches up to cover them with his own, which are crusted with dried smears of black blood. “I love you,” he says.

Sofia begins to heat up. Frustration and disbelief knot at her temples and her vision shadows. “Don’t patronize me,” she says through gritted teeth. “Tell me what happened, Saul, why won’t you tell me?” God, it feels so good to be angry. There is fear licking like a small flame at Sofia’s heart and there is a yet-unnamed apprehension racing around the room and Sofia stands and she lets it all be flattened by the avalanche of her anger. “What the fuck happened to you, Saul?”

“Sofia, Sofia,” says Antonia. She has slipped into the room without Sofia noticing. “The kids.”

“I have to get cleaned up,” says Saul. He stands and flexes his hands. “I promise, I’m fine.” He unbuttons the top button of his shirt and opens the bedroom door. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Sofia and Antonia sit on Sofia’s bed until they hear the shower run.

“It will be okay,” Antonia says. She repeats it to herself. It will be okay.

“It already isn’t,” says Sofia. Antonia and Sofia look at one another solemnly, two girls playing dress-up in the skins of women. “Did you see him? That wouldn’t have happened if everything was okay.”

Does Antonia have a half-formed memory of Carlo, stepping down the creaky inn hall on the night he disappeared, stopping to lift the sweaty curls from her face as she slept? Does she hold it somewhere wordless, as the moment her own fallibility became inescapable? There is nothing that cannot fall apart.

She holds Sofia’s hand. “It will be. It will.”

—

Saul lets the bathroom fill with steam and sits on the toilet, fully clothed.

It was only two days ago that he went to his Fianzo meeting. It feels like ten years. Saul’s thoughts scatter. Solutions appear and then dissipate like mirages.