When they arrive home, Antonia stands still at the bottom of the stairs to her building until Robbie says, Mamma, come on, and then she moves, one leaden leg after another. The windows in her apartment are blank, black. Darkened. Paolo isn’t there.

Antonia puts her boys to bed with shaking hands. She feels herself settling into a role she knows all too well: petty criminal missing, idiot wife surprised. Antonia and Paolo have been drifting apart, neither of them possessing the energy to pull themselves back together. Antonia’s body remembers the rattle of Paolo’s key in the lock. The way a part of her would tense, steeling herself against the fug of depression, the moody cloud Paolo would surely drag through her living room. Antonia prays for Paolo’s key in the lock now. She remembers it and she wills it to happen. The rattle of metal in metal. Antonia’s want pulls goosebumps up out of her skin, but there is only silence outside the front door of her apartment.

She pictures Paolo’s feet sunk into a bucket of hardening concrete, his body dragged through the far reaches of Canarsie, dumped flailing off the Belt Parkway into Long Island Sound. She pictures Paolo tied to a chair, swollen, beaten, while a faceless Fianzo brandishes bloodstained garden shears. Antonia spirals into panic. Mamma, are you crying? Robbie asks, as Antonia, a warm hand on his back, soothes him into sleep. No, caro mio, Antonia responds. She turns her face away. She hums an old song.

When Enzo and Robbie are both breathing deeply, evenly, their dreams inaccessible to watchful Antonia, she tiptoes into the living room and folds herself into the couch. Deep inside of Antonia, her organs are shifting back to their original places. The parts of her that carried a human being are shrinking, throbbing smaller and smaller so soon it will be impossible to imagine that anyone else ever lived inside her body. It will also be impossible to imagine that she had ever been alone. She clutches a small pillow and feels herself strain against it with every inhale. Somewhere, a clock ticks.

—

After dinner all it takes is a quick jerk of the head and Saul follows Joey into his study.

Rosa watches them go, and then tries to return to the cleanup. But she cannot focus: of course she can’t. She shuts her eyes and feels out into the wide world for Antonia’s fear, for Sofia’s, for Julia’s. She realizes that Antonia and Sofia will have to face whatever catastrophe is unfolding on their own.

Saul finds his hands are trembling.