Which meant that the unpleasant truth of whatever happened in the past twenty-four hours, a kiss, a wedding, possibly sex in a twin bed at Homer, couldn’t be simply pinned on Frankie. A reckoning, Zoe had said. Ezra did not like the sound of that at all. And he didn’t think Mimi would either.

But Ezra was a fantastic compartmentalizer—it was certainly part of what also made him an excellent card player. He started down Middie Walk and tried to squelch any sort of hysteria that sprung up when he thought of the consequences of last night. Though there were only two Polaroids of the two of them on the board, he’d noticed what he thought was Abel ice rink in the background of several of the pairings’ photos. If they’d been there, maybe he had been too.

Of course, the rink wasn’t just another stop in the scavenger hunt; it was another memory piled on top of all the rest. It had been shortly after they’d gone to his place for Christmas break of their junior year. She’d come to stay with him and his mom in Lower Merion, and just by adding her to their table—Henry came too, along with his mother’s younger brother whose ex-wife had the kids for the holiday—they’d expanded their family. An extra place setting that plugged a hole Ezra hadn’t even been aware of. He remembered that he’d tried to take her to the pond to skate but that Frankie didn’t know how, so they saw Moonstruck instead, and he was just as happy to do that. Because being anywhere with Frankie was better than being anywhere without her: the movie theater at the Willow Grove mall, the frozen-over pond, the front seat of his Jeep listening to “We Are the World,” he didn’t really care. When they were packing up to leave and return to campus, his mom pulled him aside and hugged him for a long time, longer than Ezra was used to, and he knew it was because she was so happy that he had found someone to move through life with, whether just in the present or perhaps for longer. They both now knew that there were no guarantees for the longer.

Ezra hadn’t thought about any of this in a very long time. How falling in love with Frankie his junior year couldn’t be separated from the joy that his mother had during her first stint of hope, of renewed health. She’d been in remission that Christmas, and maybe—it occurred to Ezra now—part of the intensity of his feelings for Frankie had simply been about relief. He shook his head and turned off Middie Walk to the footpath that led downhill to Abel. Not relief. About salvation. Maybe he was so desperate for his mother to be saved that he got things a little mixed-up and thought that Frankie needed to be rescued as well. Or maybe he was trying to save himself. It was hard to remember exactly what was running through his mind, his heart, twelve years ago, but he’d had enough space between then and now to somewhat recognize that it may not have been black and white.