She stands up and wraps a shirt around herself and carefully eases open the door of Saul’s room. The bathroom is a fifteen-foot walk down a creaky hall she is absolutely not allowed to be in, and she tiptoes along the wall, hoping for mercy from the ancient floorboards. She locks the door and peers at her face in the spotted mirror, wondering if anyone will be able to tell. She looks the same, but a bit pale from sleeping too little. She splashes icy water over her face and lowers herself to the toilet, which is cold enough to stop her breath in her throat.

In Saul’s room, thighs still stinging and heart pounding, Sofia climbs back into bed and stares at the ceiling. She cannot decide if she feels more or less whole. She isn’t sure whether she has been successful in drawing Saul into the present. The fear that she has not been enough chokes her. That she has not really changed anything—really, everything is the same—blinds her. She struggles for air, for light.

Next to her, Saul stirs. Sofia turns her head to look at him. She has never seen the features of his face so slack. His exhales whistle softly and Sofia finds she is uncomfortable to know this; it feels too personal. She feels frozen now. She wants to spring from the bed, to sprint down the icy Lower East Side street as dawn surges, to pound and thrash against something bigger than herself as light cracks the morning city open like an egg.

Sofia, in bed, claps a hand over her mouth to keep from weeping. All her life, she had been told this would change her. How disappointing to break the biggest rule she could and be left inside the same skin.

—

She leaves Saul’s room with a vague sense of dis-ease, with a disappointment bordering on disgust. Not at Saul—Sofia smiles at him as she leaves his room; he asks if she is okay; she lies—who is always kind, and in whose eyes Sofia has ruined nothing, has given away nothing, has betrayed no confidence. Sofia is disgusted by the lies she has been told about her own body. She trusts no one. She holds her arms slightly away from her body in the cab on the way home. She gets out at the corner and peers up into the curtained windows of the houses on her block, which all look like they are watching her. I was just at Antonia’s, she says, to her furious and terrified mother, to her curious and shrewd sister. I just fell asleep. I’m sorry. I know, Mamma. I’m sorry. In the bathroom, Sofia undresses and turns the water on full-blast and stands in the shower until her skin shines with heat.