He thinks about his mother. Mama, he tells her. Mama, I think I’ll see you soon.

He thinks about Sofia. She will be okay no matter what happens to him. She is a force of nature. If you have to choose, Joey says in his head. Saul knows what he will choose.

—

Outside people look at the purple sky and pray for rain. The air is thick as water. It hurts to breathe.

Chapter 29

It is mid-morning, and Lina Russo is drinking tea when there is a knock on the door.

The knock comes again. Lina sets her tea on its coaster.

There is sadness in the air of her apartment. This is the price for emotional caretaking: the sadness of others lingers. But this particular sadness, Lina realizes, as she shuffles to open the door, is new.

It comes from Paolo and Antonia, who are standing on her doorstep like children. Robbie hovers behind them; Enzo is asleep in the crook of Paolo’s elbow. Paolo’s head is hung like an old tulip on the stalk of his body; from Antonia there emanates a desperate kind of strength; the tightrope balance of staying upright.

“Mamma,” says Antonia, “can we talk to you?” Her face is grave; drawn; Lina can see small, stern Antonia as a child, quiet and measured, doing her homework or folding her clothes, building a foundation around herself.

Lina pulls them inside, hugs Paolo, kisses Antonia, says, “Tea?”

Antonia says, “Sure.”

Lina takes another look at them and says, “Gin?”

Paolo meets her eyes for the first time. There is a wry smile there. “Better,” he says.

Lina beckons to them from the kitchen, holding three clear glasses with an inch of gin and an ice cube and a lemon slice each. She passes Robbie a cookie and he sidles quietly out of the room. “Come, sit,” she says. Paolo and Antonia sit across from her at the kitchen table. The apartment smells of earth, as though Lina has been growing mushrooms in corners, letting moss sprout on walls.

“You have something to tell me,” Lina says.

“We need help,” says Antonia. “But, Mamma—you won’t like it.” She is struck through by an icy rod of fear: how carefully she has constructed her relationship with her mamma around not having conversations like the one she has come here to have. But there is no one else who will be honest with them.

Paolo has thought of a thousand ways to begin this conversation. “When Carlo,” he begins, and then stops.

Lina has raised an eyebrow. She can hear her late husband’s name now. “Yes,” she says.