An unnamed woman thinks back to a man’s hand on her knee in an airplane, but doesn’t share the memory aloud with Eddy, the man with her in the present. Eddy is her boss in a forensic lab. She is a poet trying to write sonnets. They don’t have sex, but share a closeness that keeps them together. When she tells Eddy about Virginia Woolf, he’s uninterested. Once, the woman shows up to Eddy’s house when her heat breaks and wants to read him a sonnet, but he asks her to go. The woman thinks about how she met Eddy at a lecture he gave, following him out after the lecture ended. In the lecture, he had spoken about a boy who sewed his own lips shut in a refugee camp. Outside the lecture hall, the two had talked about sewing and addicts and needles, then left and went to a hardware store. One day, while Eddy is filling vials in the lab and the woman is labeling them, they watch a squirrel and wonder how much the squirrel can pretend and perform. Now in first person, the woman reminisces about her mother’s death and how her mother loved irises. On Eddy’s birthday, his mother invites him to visit and bring the woman along. In the car driving to Eddy’s mother’s house, the woman dozes and wakes to the sensation of bleeding. She hasn’t gotten her period in months, but laughs at the thought of Eddy drawing it back out. She doesn’t tell Eddy about her bleeding, but the two talk about a dream she had recently.