When Joey gets home from hiring Saul, Rosa, who is cooking, cleaning, and circling Frankie like a hawk to make sure she does her homework, kisses his cheek. Joey reaches for her with both hands, circles her waist, steers her toward him with palms on the back of her rib cage, growls down for her mouth with his mouth. But Rosa spins away, swats him with the back of her hand. “Dinner in ten,” she says. Joey, feeling cold where he had hoped to wrap Rosa into his arms, into himself, kisses Frankie on the top of the head. “Papa, my hair,” Frankie says, shrugging him away.

Down the hall, Sofia is sitting at her desk, chin propped up on her hand, hair glinting in a circle of lamplight. Joey imagines Sofia, four years old, running to him when he got home. Six, and sitting on his lap when they ran out of chairs at dinner, eating his olives when she thinks he isn’t looking and then grinning up at him, maniacal, bright as lightning.

Sofia, eight, hand on the back of small Antonia, who has collapsed into sobs at their kitchen table for the second time that week. Sofia, half her attention on the grief of her friend, and half watching Joey’s face the way a hawk watches a vole twitch, hundreds of feet below on the earth. I know what you did.

All I’ve wanted is to make life easier for you, Joey wants to say to Sofia. But Carlo’s face surfaces in his mind. That, and the heart-swell of power. The perfection of control. Liar, says his memory.

Sofia at fourteen, glaring at him, fearless, as he and Rosa and Frankie left for church. She was always his girl.

Go to her, he commands himself. Nothing moves.

Chapter 10

Sofia, seventeen, cannot feel her papa’s desperation, and cannot connect to herself at four, six, eight, fourteen. Seventeen is an abyss: she feels divorced from her past selves, with their clearer heartbreaks. And the future—so close now the walls of the present buckle under its weight—is still a swirling panic. Sofia feels alone. She feels disconnected.

And when she sees Saul Grossman for the first time across a Sunday dinner table, she decides in an instant what she needs to tie herself back to the earth.

Saul is thin and dark-eyed. Close-shaven. Sofia watches him eat. He mixes everything together, small bits of beans and meat and cured lemon rind and sweet melon all in one bite. He chews carefully.

Sofia knees Antonia under the table. “Do you know who that is?”

Antonia looks. “I haven’t seen him before,” she says. I can ask Paolo, she almost says. It would slip out so easily. She turns her attention back to her plate.

“I heard my parents talking,” Sofia says. “My father hired a Jew, from Germany. Does he look like a Jew to you?”