Paolo Luigio was born on Elizabeth Street, in the kind of boxy tenement apartment with more walls than it was built with and more inhabitants than it was meant to house. He is the youngest of four brothers, and the first to leave for work in Brooklyn, where his impeccable handwriting and meticulous craftsmanship can be of use forging paperwork—passports, birth certificates, letters of reference—that Jewish refugees need to find legitimate American jobs. He doesn’t mind the odd hours or the moral ambiguity of the work; he dreams of wearing a suit as beautifully tailored as the ones his bosses wear; of walking into a room and feeling it hush in his presence. Greatness, that ever-elusive standard by which some boys are born judging their lives, had whispered in his ear early on.

Paolo asks Antonia to lunch as the trees begin to lose their leaves. She tells herself to say no, not to go out with a man who so obviously works for Joey Colicchio, but when she opens her mouth nothing comes out and she finds herself nodding. She cannot focus her eyes, but she is warmed syrup. She is an ice cube in the sun. Antonia thinks Paolo seems to exist in two places at once: here, in the hallway, smiling at her, and also, somehow, somewhere in a future of his own imagining. Neither of them lives entirely on the earth. They go to the corner café and Antonia learns that Paolo is twenty years old. She learns that he loves to read but grew up speaking Italian at home and finds reading in either English or Italian to be more difficult than listening to a conversation. She learns that he likes the work he does for Sofia’s father, but not what it is. “You know how it goes,” he says, by way of not explaining, and she does. She tells him that her father died when she was young, but not how. “It was just one of those things,” she says by way of not explaining, and he nods. She learns that Paolo is afraid of heights, and as he tells her, she watches him fiddle mindlessly with the napkin ring, the butter knife, and though the rest of his body is calm she learns that he is never still. She tells him that she is timid in large groups of people. “I don’t think you should be,” he says, definitively, and she asks, “Why?” and he says, “Because you’re spectacular,” and then falls silent, and as Paolo watches Antonia in the midday restaurant air he realizes that though her mind is rarely calm she is nearly always still.