Antonia marries Paolo as the winter air loses its sting. Lina sits tearless and erect in the frontmost pew, looking straight ahead. In the back of the church, Paolo’s work associates line up neatly, and in a surreal coincidence, in order of height, like a matryoshka doll of criminals and smugglers. Lina can count the hairs on her head, so alert is her skin. So strong, her resolve not to acknowledge the Family men.

Joey walks Antonia down the aisle and is astonished that the little girl he watched learn to swim on a Long Island summer day is the capable, intelligent young woman he is giving away to be married. He nods as graciously as he can manage at Lina, but a nod cannot bridge twelve years of sorrow, the gaping vacuum between them where Carlo should be, the ways they have both evolved to survive.

Sofia and Saul do not sit together; they are not married yet; Sofia has stuffed herself into her nicest dress, which zipped when she stood with her stomach sucked in but which now seems to accentuate the expansion of her belly. When she stands she looks perfectly normal but when she sits she spills over her waistband. She does not fit in her dress; does not fit in this wedding, where she sits with her mamma and Frankie and covers her midsection with Frankie’s scarf. She does not fit with the women here; she cannot sit with the men. She is neither a child nor, truly, an adult. Sofia squirms. She can feel Saul’s gaze from the back of the room, where he stands with the other Family men. In the back, in deference to Lina. Present, in deference to Paolo and Joey, to the connections that bind all of them. There is no easy way to untangle what is Family and what is family. There is no clean separation of professional from personal. Sofia understands more of this balance now, because of Saul. Saul is connected to a wider world, where a girl’s anger at her father or frustration with her mother or adherence—or lack thereof!—to the rules is not the biggest thing. Where sometimes, Sofia is beginning to understand, you have to do things you wouldn’t have expected to protect the people you love.