“God, what is it about politics that makes people lose their heads?” I ask Mom.

Mom chuckles.

“They think the ends justify the means,” she says.

I’m kicking myself for trusting Adam with small stories from my day. That’s a HIPAA violation on my part too, I realize, but it’s hard to keep everything I see at work bottled up.

Does this mean I can never trust Adam to keep something to himself? And has the campaign changed him, or is it revealing who he’s been all along? I think of the cautionary hand on my knee in the bookshop, the rosy picture he’s posted on Facebook, his sudden desire for commitment, or at least the appearance of it. I can’t help but feel like he’s staging a new reality.

Mom checks her watch, and I’m reminded how excited we’ve been to see this quirky, off-Broadway production of Oklahoma! I tell myself not to think about Adam’s post or Shair and focus on the performance. We enter the dimmed theater and pick up our tickets from the plump woman in the box office. An inky-eyed Maltese dressed in a tuxedo sits on a director’s chair next to her, overseeing ticket sales. Mom hoots with delight at the well-behaved dog and snaps a photograph.

Our seats are left of center stage. We settle in just as the lights flash on and off and the chime of a triangle signals the start of the show. Mom takes the armrest between us and smiles.

“I can’t believe you did this, Ary. You really didn’t have to,” she says. She is looking more and more like Tilly these days, especially since she hasn’t cut her hair in months. “But if, at any point, you don’t want to be here, we’ll go. You rise and I’ll follow.”

“I’m fine, Mom. It’s just a show for me,” I tell her truthfully. I’d only heard Tilly read scenes from the script. I don’t know the music and never saw the performance in Kabul. But all those library books Mom checked out on grief and trauma have made her cautious about triggering experiences.

Through the opening act, Mom’s lips move ever so slightly during the musical numbers, the lyrics ready on her tongue as if she’s been in rehearsals all week. Music is miraculous in that way—songs wiggle their way into some black box in the corner of our hippocampi. Decades later, triggered by a word or an image or a few notes, they fly to the surface at warp speed.