The day Paolo comes to dinner at her apartment, Antonia spends the afternoon cleaning. There is not much that can be done about the shabbiness of the sofa, the sunken spot that belies Lina’s favorite place to sit, the browning throw rugs in the kitchen and living room. But Antonia shines the mirrors and countertops until they gleam. She makes dinner and the apartment fills with steam and fragrance, warm garlic and the fresh spice of lemons. She hounds Lina until Lina showers, dresses, pulls her hair away from her face. Lina looks almost normal, Antonia thinks. Almost like a real mother. Antonia shakes her head to rid it of that ugliness. Things between her and Lina have been good since their first tentative conversation about Paolo. Antonia believes Lina wants her to be happy. But Lina is strange, and getting stranger: women have begun sneaking in and out of the living room to visit with her when Lina thinks Antonia is asleep. Lina is charting her own course. Antonia might admire this, but there is a part of her that is still too angry. She doesn’t trust Lina to shower before company comes over, or to give advice about wedding details. She doesn’t trust Lina to stay in the real world for long enough to have dinner with her fiancé, and so Antonia spends the day cleaning and cooking, one suspicious eye trained on Lina, who wants to be trusted, but who cannot bear the inconvenience of making herself presentable for company, or eating at a pre-arranged time, rather than whenever she decides she is hungry.

The women visiting Lina came at the maga’s suggestion. It is, after all, the maga’s job to consider the unasked question, which in Lina’s case had to do with how to move forward once you know there is no path that can guarantee against pain and disappointment. And so now there is the candle burning in Lina’s window, the women slipping in her front door after Antonia has left for Sunday dinner. The women want a conversation over upturned tarocchi cards, or they want to hear the words Lina whispers to each full moon. The women come back again and again. And they pay her enough that Lina is planning to quit the laundry when Antonia gets married. Gone will be her chapped hands, cracks extending painfully down the pads of her fingers, no matter how much olive oil she rubs into them. She will never need to abide by the ticking of a clock again.

She will be done letting fear control her. And if Antonia wants to put herself in terror’s way, Lina cannot stop her. No one would have been able to stop Lina, when she married Carlo. The inevitability of pain—the way love makes certain aches inescapable—used to wake Lina, heart pounding, terror coursing through her, every night.