She is unspeakably sorry. She is filled with remorse that threatens to burst her open. She will not run away this time. She will not ask her daughter to hold her hand.

“Tell me about him,” she says to Antonia. Let me be your mamma again.

—

Antonia calls Sofia the night after she tells her mamma about Paolo because really, nothing scares her anymore, and Sofia listens as Antonia says I’m in love and Sofia notices a small rancid place weighing her heart down as she listens, but she says I’m so happy for you and hangs up the phone and is alone in her bedroom with her rotten heart and her flimsy fantasies.

—

Sofia develops a habit of lingering outside the parlor door, eavesdropping on Paolo and Saul as they work. It is this way she has learned that Saul is from Berlin, where he got the neatly articulated ends of his words and the quiet ja that sometimes slips out as he is listening to someone else speak. She has internalized his schedule by listening to him describe the rounds he makes of boardinghouses and hotels, unfathomably foreign neighborhoods like Borough Park and parts of the Lower East Side so low and so east they could be mistaken for water, for the crumbling edge of the island itself. She has seen Paolo checking off names on a long list, passing neatly wrapped packages that she has learned contain valuable forgeries for wealthy European Jews willing to pay for a new life. And she has seen her father, lurking in the room like a conscience, weighing stacks of bills with a practiced hand and kissing Paolo and Saul before they leave.

Sofia understands both the Family and Germany like a nightmare she can only partially remember—something sinister in both of them, her belly and throat are sure—but she chooses to feel comforted by the sound of Saul and Paolo and her papa, plotting in their baritones, working against a vague and unnameable evil. They cannot all three be on the wrong side.

—