Antonia looks at Sofia. She is standing by the doorway of Sofia’s bedroom, backlit by the lamp on Sofia’s desk. She has the same face she had when she was five, and nine, and thirteen. “Every moment,” is what she says. “But what alternative do I have?”

—

After Antonia leaves, Sofia turns over her newfound anger in her mind. It’s hot as molten metal. She cocks her head toward the rumble of end-of-dinner conversation from the sitting room, but she can’t quite hear it. So Sofia slips through her bedroom door in stocking feet. As she gets closer to the living room, the rumble sorts itself out into her papa, talking with her uncle and her grandfather.

Sofia peers through a crack in the nearly shut set of French doors to the living room. Joey is sitting up tall, spine straight, broad shoulders inclined toward Rosa’s father. “I don’t envy you,” Sofia’s grandfather is saying. “To start a new business venture, right as a war gets going—it’s hard to get people to buy anything during a war.”

“We’ll have to make sure we’re selling something they can’t get by without,” says Joey. A line appears, north to south on his forehead. Sofia watches his thoughts churn. It’s hard to hold on to her anger while she is looking at the familiar face of her papa. Sofia is too stubborn to ask herself whether her anger is a flimsy mask for something deeper and more complicated, but looking at Joey, something in her knows she is not just angry. She’s not ready to admit it, but Sofia is wildly curious. This makes her feel like a traitor: to Antonia, who has been hurt so profoundly by the machinations of Family. To her mamma, who only ever wanted for Sofia to be happy with the space carved out for her in the world.

It doesn’t make her a traitor to Joey, though. It makes her closer to him than Sofia ever imagined.

—

In the time it takes Antonia to kiss Rosa, close the door to Sofia’s apartment, walk down Sofia’s stairs, and walk up into her own building, Antonia lets go of her dream of a college degree in a town where no one knows her name. Without the Family, without her history, and without Sofia, she is an empty shell. She’ll never make it on her own. This is what she tells herself, but of course, the truth is more complicated: Antonia is suddenly not sure she wants to make it on her own. There has to be a way, she thinks, to get out from under the Family’s thumb without abandoning the people she loves. There has to be a way to get everything she wants.

—