We haven’t used the sleeper sofa in a year and a half, not since the last houseguest came to visit. No one really visits anymore. There’s no point. We tried it once, a dinner party for some old friends I’d met when Steven was still in diapers, but after an hour of the men talking and the women staring into their plates of salmon, everyone decided to go home.

I pry up the corduroy-covered cushion next to me and slip my red-X folder in among a few cracker crumbs, a stray piece of popcorn, and some spare change.

This “it,” encased in a dull manila folder rubbed shiny by my own hands, is the work that will, when I’m ready, reverse Wernicke’s aphasia. I’ve thought about finding a more permanent hiding place for it, but given the year’s worth of crap I find beneath the sofa cushions, I don’t see the need.

No one, not even Patrick, knows we had passed the brink from “close” to “finished,” although I believe Lin and Lorenzo suspected.

The day before Thomas and his Taser-carrying men came for me the first time, I had been winding down a lecture on linguistic processing in the posterior left hemisphere—the area of the brain where temporal and parietal lobes meet. Wernicke’s area, and the language loss that accompanies damage to this complex cluster of gray matter, was the reason most of my students signed on for this seminar, and on that day the room was packed with colleagues of colleagues, the dean, and a few out-of-town researchers intrigued by our group’s latest breakthrough. Lin and Lorenzo sat in the back row as I talked.

They must have seen the gleam in my eyes when I moved through the slides of brain imagery on the projector, zooming closer to the target area. The serum we would use wasn’t mine. Repairs would happen naturally with the aid of an interleukin-1 receptor antagonist, a drug already widely in use to counter the effects of rheumatoid arthritis, and infant stem cells, which would increase the plasticity of the subject’s brain, encouraging rapid repair and rebuilding. One of my contributions—our contributions—involved pinpointing the exact locus of application without affecting the surrounding areas of cortical tissue and causing further damage.

We had another ace up our sleeves. One Wednesday morning last spring, when the cherry blossoms had exploded into photogenic candy and Washington had begun to flood with its annual onslaught of tourists, Lorenzo pulled me into his office.

Of course, he kissed me. I can still taste the bitter espresso on his lips. Strange how a kiss can turn bitter into sweet.

He kissed deep and hard, as lovers do when kisses are stolen or come with a price, but then he broke away and smiled.

“I’m not done yet,” I said.