Saul is smiling, but he doesn’t look astounded. He looks like he’s about to laugh. “Sofia, right?” he says.

For an agonizing second, Sofia believes that her humiliation will be so powerful she will burrow down into the earth. She shuts her eyes and wills her body to sink directly through the floor.

When she opens her eyes Saul is still in front of her. “I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I’m so—”

“It’s okay,” he says, and the way he says it makes Sofia feel like it might, after all, be okay. “I have a meeting with your father,” he says. “I should—”

“Go,” she says. “Go.”

That night Sofia tosses and turns in a pool of nervous sweat, hair slick against her damp neck, sheets alternately boiling and then freezing. What will I say to you, she wonders, if I see you again?

—

She doesn’t have to wonder long. Sofia spends a restless Saturday staring out her bedroom window but Saul arrives early on Sunday, before Sofia’s extended family, before the group of three to five uncles, Vito or Nico or Bugs, something like that, each of them, before their wives, who Sofia used to think were the height of glamour but lately whose acrylic nails and carefully curled hair and over-perfumed necks Sofia finds exhausting, trite, boring: this is, of course, a reflection of Sofia’s own boredom, her own exhaustion, her own unanswered questions. There are only two months of high school left, and then nothingness.

Antonia isn’t coming; she’s in Manhattan with Paolo’s family again, and Sofia is relieved she will not have to navigate Antonia’s knowing glance, the way she understands everything Sofia is thinking without Sofia saying a thing. It is draining to watch Antonia’s life spring forward in carefully constructed leaps. It makes Sofia feel like she is doing everything wrong.

The radio is on in the kitchen and Rosa is sifting powdered sugar over tarts and hazelnut cookies and there is the big pot, full of boiling water on the stove. Sofia is rolling out dough on the counter, breathing out each time she pushes the rolling pin away from herself, and Frankie is next to her, mincing onions and rolling stacks of basil leaves into thin tubes to slice them into ribbons. Sofia’s hair has escaped into a dusty, floured cloud around her head, and there are stinging onion tears dripping from the corners of her eyes when she hears a voice ask, “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help in here?”