Next door, alone, Lina softens into the couch where she spends her days off and feels the emptiness in her apartment buzzing in her ears. How strange it is, to live in an entirely different world from the people with whom you once spent every day. How improbable, to have the same face you have always had, but an unrecognizable soul.

—

Sofia lies in bed that night and imagines that Antonia has met a new best friend. In her imagination the other girl is taller than Sofia, and thinner, and has brighter eyes. She is quieter and more contained. She does not lash out; she does not lose her temper; she is more like Antonia. The Antonia in Sofia’s imagination is much happier with her new friend. She does not need Sofia anymore. The two of them link arms and share the quiet secrets of confident friendships; they laugh softly; their underarms never smell bitter and rotten. Sofia falls into a restless, untethered sleep, and wakes the next morning feeling like she has forgotten something terrible.

On her second Monday of high school Sofia does not ask Antonia what she did that weekend and Antonia does not know how to tell her bright, beautiful friend that she has been spending her Sundays at Mass. Lately, her papa’s features hover just on the edge of her memory, refusing to come into focus.

And so this year Sofia and Antonia keep their first secrets. They separate. And in each of them something wholly new begins to grow.

—

Lina Russo is not a ghost. She is still a woman. She feels herself living inside skin that, when she looks in the mirror, looks like her skin.

But she is a woman frozen in time. Her life ended on the morning Carlo disappeared. She had spent her entire life up to that point fearing that Carlo would disappear, or, when she was a child, fearing that someone like Carlo would do something like disappear.

Lina has always sensed that if she built a world around herself, it could be taken away.

There is nothing to be done, she knows, after the worst has happened.

But it has been seven years. And Lina has a secret too. It is that in the last months, when Antonia sneaks away—to church, Lina knows, the smell of the incense as familiar as the smell of her own skin—Lina pulls a shawl over her head and floats as quickly as she can down the block to the very smallest and shabbiest building in the neighborhood. She knocks three times and feels her heart pounding in her chest and in the tips of her fingers and behind her eyes. She enters the home of the neighborhood maga.