Adam sets me up in the living room with the TV remote and a glass of wine and the bottle just in case. He tells me I get to be a lady of leisure while he makes dinner. I flip channels for a while, but TV chatter is a reminder of my old life. It makes me feel like a bag of coffee spilled in the dirt and I realize I’d rather listen to the rhythm of Adam chopping things in the kitchen, the clink of pots and pans, and the sound of water boiling. I drink my wine and pour some more and think about how these are the sounds of what a home is supposed to be. This is what most people grow up to. I lie on the futon with my hair falling over the side to the floor and watch the way the light changes as the sun sets, and the smell of garlic gets warmer and fuller, and I think of it all like a song, with words I can’t quite hear yet. I hold my hands like I have a guitar and pretend I’m strumming to try to focus the words in my head. Something about deception, something about perception, and something about home and love boiling in the kitchen and light turning to dark on the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” Adam says.

I jump to my feet, my imaginary guitar falling to the floor.

“There’s something you don’t know about me,” I say, and instantly I wish I could catch all those words and push them back in my mouth like they never happened.

“That you’ve had too much wine?” Adam says, kissing me on the forehead.

I steady myself on the arm of the futon. “It’s that… it’s that… I’m, I-I play guitar.”

“Air guitar?”

“Real guitar,” I say. “I don’t have one anymore. But I did play. And it’s just, it’s important. It’s the most important, and you didn’t even know.”

“Well, thank you for telling me.” Adam smiles in the way that makes his eyes crinkle.

“Thank you for being somebody I could tell,” I say, and my eyes well up.

“Hey, hey,” Adam says, wrapping his arms around me. “It’s okay. Someday you’ll tell me all of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We all have our weepy wine nights,” he says. “It’s what makes us human.”

“I thought it was opposable thumbs,” I say. It’s the one thing I remember from science class. I like the word opposable.

“That too,” he says. “Thumbs and the ability to get weepy out of nowhere when we have too much wine. Those are the two things that make us human.”