The study has achy French doors which Joey shuts now, so the end-of-dinner din sounds like it is coming from a different world. Joey hands Saul a drink, which Saul grips until his fingertips go white. Joey runs a hand through his salt-and- pepper hair, as if he is trying to rake up a solution to whatever catastrophe Saul has wrought.

“You’re in trouble,” says Joey.

“I’m fixing it,” says Saul. He is twenty-three and he is promising Joey he loves Sofia. “I can handle it.”

“I’ve retired,” says Joey. “I will take your word for it.”

“Thank you,” says Saul.

“But I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

Joey crosses his arms. “I once told you that you don’t get to die when you’re a father,” he says.

“I remember,” says Saul.

“I lied,” says Joey. “If you have to choose between you and them—”

“I know,” says Saul.

“I trust you can get yourself out of whatever predicament you’ve found yourself in,” says Joey. “But, Saul, if it comes down to it.”

“I know,” says Saul.

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” says Saul.

Chapter 28

How can anyone move forward when their lives are increasingly full of ghosts that demand their time and attention? The ghost of Carlo, who haunts them all, and the ghosts of their former selves, the exoskeletons they all try to shed and bury, to lock in a closet, to repurpose. Their houses are full to bursting.

—

Paolo is sitting on a bench in the middle of the pedestrian overpass on the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun rises. He hasn’t been awake for a full sunrise in a long time. It is cloudy; it is as cool as New York ever gets in July; as still. There are thick, heavy thunderstorms predicted for this week, Paolo remembers. He read that in the newspaper, nine hundred years ago when he sat at a kitchen table for breakfast with Robbie and Antonia, with Enzo, this new person.

Paolo is sure he is tired, but he doesn’t feel it: the achy limbs, the scratchy, sticky eyes. If he is still enough, he feels like he is shimmering, detaching from his body. As the air thickens Paolo feels himself as something insubstantial and disconnected from the world. Later he will admire the power of this: to have an essential core, something unchanged by the chaos around him. To be a self, battered and bolstered by the tides of time.