Everyone I knew in Little River worked on their own houses, turned barns into garages and garages to extra bedrooms, but they didn’t ever seem to have much of a plan.

“Is it hard to design a building when you’ve never built one?” I ask.

Adam seems surprised by my question. “I’m about to find out, I guess.”

He kicks off his boots and lines them up, side by side, heels against the trunk. He’s careful about everything—how he touches my arm or leans closer to show me a sketch from his notebook—like he understands that I might be scared and doesn’t want to add to it. I’ve never been around someone who didn’t have at least a little bit of reckless bubbling under their skin, but he doesn’t.

We talk for hours. I don’t understand a lot of what he’s telling me about his doctorate program at Cornell, the classes he’s teaching and something or someone called a TA, but he doesn’t seem to expect me to. And eventually he starts talking about ordinary things.

He’s twenty-seven. He’s from a place called Needham. He used to smoke, but only cloves. He quit when his favorite professor died of lung cancer in August, but when he’s working he still reaches for cigarettes that aren’t there. Now his ashtray holds loose change.

It feels like we’re playing house on an old fashioned TV show where the couple comes home and talks about their day. I never thought people actually did that. My dad, when he did come home, used to sit and smoke and be all stuck in his head like he wasn’t even there.

Adam’s voice is soft, but it fills the room. There’s more space than furniture, so every word echoes just a little. My extremities are thawed. The dark is outside. I wish this was actually what life was like, even though it’s just this simple little thing. Two people sitting on a couch.

Adam clears his throat and looks at the ceiling. “Another Coke?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

And then we’re back on the couch with his beer and my Coke and talking like we’re old friends or new friends, or I don’t know what. Like he’s forgotten how I almost kissed him last night.

He wants to get a dog and maybe a kayak. He wants to have a kid someday. His girlfriend left him last year. He doesn’t say why. I want to know, but I don’t think I should ask. I tell him I left someone. I tell him that sometimes, it’s only about the person leaving. Sometimes, the person being left did nothing to deserve it.