After Antonia goes home, Sofia sits on her bed and tells herself, you are not allowed to do this. It has never worked for her before. She lists forbidden things that she has done: skipping class to sit swinging her legs on a park bench in the sun. Winking at the construction workers who tip their helmets to her and purse their lips. Once, telling her parents that she would watch Frankie, but spending the whole time in her room, and letting Frankie get into the bathtub alone. Buying the brassiere her mama wouldn’t be caught dead buying for my daughter, with the scalloped lace edges and the modern cut. Walking alone from Canal to Fourteenth, shoulders thrust back, head high.

Down the hall, Saul Grossman has lingered to speak with her father. The doors to the parlor echo as they shut; the evening air thickens. Sofia Colicchio, skin all abuzz, ecstatic with curiosity in her bedroom.

—

Antonia stalks home, carrying a plate of leftovers for Lina. Her anger is a red-hot coal, a condensed and burning thing. She slams the front door of the apartment harder than she means to, and not being a dish-thrower or an insult-hurler, decides to make tea. The water boils and Antonia pours it into a pot; the leaves soften and spread. And as the tea runs golden through the strainer into her mamma’s cup, Antonia gets angrier and angrier.

She is angry with Paolo for giving her this awful ultimatum. She is angry with Sofia, for falling into infatuation over eggplant and sausage, for living so fully in her own affections. For saying, I shouldn’t have asked you, so casually, as though there were no depths to Antonia that Sofia could not reach in and scoop up and comb her fingers through. She is angry with her mother, for giving her life to regret and sadness. Mostly, Antonia is angry with herself. For being unable to summon the courage to be her whole self in front of the people who love her most, and for refusing to show a man who has been nothing but kind and warm and giving that she loves him back. For looking happiness in the eye and telling it, I’m not ready.

Antonia puts her mamma’s teacup on a tray. She drops a lump of sugar in and stirs it. “Mamma,” she calls. “I made you some tea.” She turns the oven on its lowest setting and puts Lina’s plate in to warm up.

Lina shuffles in, wearing a robe and slippers. Her hair is wispy and tangled from resting against the back of the couch. She grips the back of her chair with long fingers. Her nails are cracked and the skin around them bleached. “You got home later than usual,” Lina says.