“I confronted him.”

“And he told you he didn’t do it.” Antonia says this loudly, but the truth is starting to whisper in through the windows.

“He admitted to all of it,” says Paolo. “He apologized. He said he’s been trying to think of a way out for months.”

“There’s no way out,” says Antonia. This is not happening. The walls contract and expand around her, the way walls always do when an old world is being exchanged for a new one.

“I told him they offered me a job in return for taking care of him,” says Paolo. “He said he would understand. He said, do it.” Paolo puts his empty cup down on the counter. “I punched him. I couldn’t help myself. I hit him again.” Paolo begins to cry. “I hit him over and over again, Tonia, and he wouldn’t fight back, he wouldn’t do anything. Of course I wouldn’t do it. He’s family. He’s a part of us. I could never—does he think I could do that?”

Antonia is at the center of a storm. It is calm and quiet there. “Sofia’s missing,” she says. And then she crosses the kitchen. She buries herself in Paolo’s chest. She feels her heart thumping against his ribs.

—

Saul is calm as he hangs up the phone. He hasn’t slept in long enough that his swollen lip and blackened eye are singing, his whole body throbbing.

In the middle of the night, after Saul had arrived in Paolo’s office, which seemed to him as good a hiding spot as any, he called Eli Leibovich. He asked for help. And he was refused.

I have to think about my family, said Eli. I have to play a longer game. Eli would not protect Saul. He would not defend Saul. Saul put family on the line for a man who was not, in the end, anything more than a work acquaintance with a familiar accent. And now Tommy Fianzo Jr. will not rest until Saul is gone.

Saul thinks about his wife. He thinks about his daughter. He aches to be tangled under them, Sofia and Julia on either side of his chest, sleeping. Every moment of his life until this moment is washed in gold. Saul realizes how utterly alive he has always been. How full of self his skin. How full of breath his lungs.

Saul wonders what it would be like to be Paolo. To be born into a family that raised you. To have a father. To work each day behind a desk, to go home on time.

And like it did when he was twenty-one, rocking empty-stomached in the bottom of a boat to America, a wave of will, of survival itself, swells toward Saul. Fight, his nature tells him. Fight, from his lungs. Fight, the incessant beating of blinking.

Saul closes his eyes.