But Antonia has told no one about Paolo, and she cannot marry him until she does. She worries that if she tells her mamma, or Sofia, her reasons for loving him will be revealed as flimsy. She is worried that he will be rendered smaller, or less important, in the act of telling her larger-than-life best friend. Sofia never means to belittle Antonia, and perhaps Antonia lets herself be made small too easily, but she still fears the quizzical rise of Sofia’s brow; her cherry lips rounding in shock and maybe laughter, a little derision sneaking into the really, you? and the well who is he? I’ve never heard of him. Antonia’s carefully constructed relationship will come crashing down. She knows her mamma will be furious and disappointed that she loves a man who works for the Family. Her mamma might collapse under the weight of Antonia’s inadvertent but encompassing betrayal. Don’t speak to anyone with slicked-back hair. Paolo’s is brown, but so dark it’s almost black, and it moves toward the back of his head on its own, in a cresting wave that frames his face.

And his job is a good one. Good, in that it is enough to rescue Antonia from her own graveyard home. Good, in that it will pay for their future children to be fed, and it will buy them clothes and books. Good, in that by marrying Paolo, Antonia will buy herself time, and space. No wraparound porch, but an apartment with multiple rooms. A safety net for her children. Antonia, a child of loss, can build with anything she is given. She can see her life unrolling before her like an infinite carpet. Antonia and Paolo, in perpetuity, construct a home from the ground up. They do not carry anything that holds them back.

She wants to tell her mother about him first. She wants to tell Sofia. The secret has started waking her in the night, twisting its fingers through her hair and holding her down. But the words are locked somewhere below her lungs and she cannot find the key.

—

New York City straddles the mid-Atlantic coast. It is part swamp in the summer; part empty northern wasteland in the winter. And the city creates weather, like a mountain range: in the summer, the pavement and the buildings trap and heat the air; in the winter, wind screams down the long avenues, nature itself whirling through the concrete jungle.

Some years, in the fall, New Yorkers can already tell the winter will be long. Those years there is a patience to the biting wind and the monochrome gray of pre-snowy days. There is a sadistic brilliance even in the blue skies—clear days serve to highlight the leafless trees, to augment the stark lifelessness of the landscape.