Sofia opens each of the drawers in Saul’s desk in turn. The last is locked. She narrows her eyes, slides her hand into the drawer pull and yanks so fast and so hard that anyone awake might have thought there was a crack of thunder. The drawer splinters. Inside are small notebooks. Sofia is opening them before she realizes what she is doing. She is scanning pages covered in Saul’s quick scrawl. T.F. alone, though last time he said he’d bring Jr. this month. Apparently Jr. not as enthused by the opportunity to meet me. One guard, the big one w/ nine fingers who spends all his time smoking. T.F. says things might change now that Joey’s not in charge, now that he’s stepping down.

If this was a journal, Sofia thinks, or a record for Joey, it wouldn’t be locked away. What could Saul have been doing that he needed to hide from his family?

And then Sofia begins, like anyone would, to replay moments from the last year. Why can’t we sit together like a real family? Saul had been touchy, angry, sure of what a real family would do. Implying, Sofia realizes, that he didn’t have one. He has been unhappy, she realizes. And I have not been listening.

There is a phone number written on the first page of the notebook Sofia is holding. She picks up the phone on Saul’s desk and dials.

“Whoever is waking me up for the second fucking time tonight had better have a good fucking reason,” says a male voice on the other end.

“Who is this?” asks Sofia. She asks with the same certainty she had once asked Joey why. She asks, and she expects an answer. She calls it out of thin air; she demands it.

“Ma’am,” says the voice on the phone, “I think you might have the wrong number.” It is softened, now. It is off guard.

“I can assure you,” says Sofia, “I do not. Who are you?”

“My name is Eli,” says Eli Leibovich, “but I am certain you’ve dialed—” Sofia doesn’t hear the rest of what he says, because she has put the phone on the table. There is only one Eli whose number Saul would need to lock in a drawer. The way Saul has gotten into trouble becomes crystal clear.

Like she is in a dream, Sofia leaves the phone buzzing off its hook and floats downstairs to stand on her porch in the night air. As a child, she was scared of Lina’s helplessness, the way a part of her disappeared when Carlo did.

The part of Sofia that lives in Saul will disappear if Saul does, but Sofia, standing in her nightgown in the warm predawn air, is not going to let that happen.

—