What a debacle this was. The wedding band and the condoms and the blackout hangover and the sleepover in Homer.

He pushed himself to his feet. He wished Gregory were here, but he wasn’t. But Ezra didn’t want to do this alone. He never wanted to do most things alone. He knew this was a squishy area for him; he did know, theoretically, that there was room for improvement. But still, with the sun brightening the campus and with Burton at his back, he thought that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he found Frankie.

This startled him—admittedly. He’d spent ten years convincing himself that Frankie Harriman was the worst possible scenario. But now, he allowed for the notion that maybe things could have been different with them, for them, if he hadn’t been so needy, if he hadn’t pushed her outside her comfort zone.

Ezra had always assumed that Frankie would follow him to New York. They hadn’t exactly discussed it, but they hadn’t not discussed it either. She seemed thrilled for him, at the NYU acceptance, at the scholarship package. It was true that she kept urging him to wait to hear from Stanford and to take UCLA or USC more seriously, and Ezra didn’t tell her this, but he’d pulled the rest of his applications once this acceptance came in. He wanted to be near Henry; he wanted to stay within driving distance of his mother, who wasn’t even close to out of the woods the winter of his senior year. Though he knew Frankie had all sorts of issues with her own parents, they didn’t seem like anything that would make her flee from Manhattan. For a long time, he blamed her for not opening up about the baggage from her childhood: the pressure and the prodigious gift and how much all of that took from her. How eventually, she just wanted to be normal. But maybe he didn’t ask the right questions. Or maybe he didn’t ask enough questions, if he were really honest with himself. Maybe he didn’t want to make any waves after that initial argument in Steinway Auditorium when he’d caught her playing after her parents had called to say they were making their separation a permanent one.

It takes two to tussle, his own mother had used to say, whenever Ezra would complain about his dad and how he’d dropped out of their lives. She got the idiom wrong, but Ezra loved her all the more for it, and it’s not as if he didn’t get her meaning. Back then, he had always thought that this was simply her being overly kind toward his father, protecting Ezra from the shit-all truth. But maybe what she meant, it truly just dawned on him now, as he abandoned any hope of Gregory’s arrival and descended the steps of Burton, was that everyone shared responsibility in both their triumphs and their failures. Everyone—his dad, his mom, him, Frankie, the whole lot of them—always has ownership, for better and worse.