Ezra forgot about the kiss and Frankie standing beside him wearing his grandmother’s ring and rushed forward.

“Look who I ran into in the lobby,” Gregory said dryly. “She wanted to come find you too.”

Ezra froze for a beat before Mimi made a face and he realized that he hadn’t hugged her, he hadn’t kissed her hello. He swooped in and lifted her off her feet. When he rested her back on the ground, he noticed that she looked uncharacteristically rough. Her skin was blotchy; she had bags under her eyes. Ezra wasn’t judging. Ezra didn’t care. His plan was back on, the proposal still a possibility!

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They got me on a direct flight this morning.” She gestured to the snow. “I guess you can’t mess with God.” She managed a smile that was perfectly beguiling, and if Ezra didn’t know better (he told himself not to know better), he’d believe her.

Because somewhere in the back of Ezra’s mind, which was both muddled and jumping like a live wire now, he remembered that this was a lie. That her flight had taken off and landed on time yesterday. But maybe he’d gotten that wrong. Maybe the American Airlines website had been wrong. It’s not like technology was always right! Ezra didn’t actually believe that: technology was almost always right—which was part of the reason he’d been so stressed about Y2K and why Google was knocking on his door. But he was so awash in relief, so overjoyed that Mimi was here, at Middleton, and that—this was important—she was not Frankie, and that everything was going to be ok, that he told himself another untruth: that he’d been mistaken about her flight because Mimi would never intentionally deceive him. And he had his own deceits, so what was one more lie when so many had already been told? He’d just kissed his ex-girlfriend! Couldn’t they all agree to ignore the various misdeeds and wounds from the past day and just move on? Wouldn’t that be the easiest solution?

Gregory looked from Ezra to Frankie to Mimi and back to Ezra again. He appeared decidedly less thrilled than Ezra would have hoped from a dear friend who knew he was set to propose to the theoretical love of his life. Then Ezra remembered the gold band on his left ring finger and wondered if that had anything to do with it. Mimi hadn’t yet noticed, so he shoved his hand in his pants pocket and wiggled it off with his thumb. He felt his anxiety spike to level ten again, just as he was smiling at the one thing, the one person, who should have calmed him.

Frankie took a quick step backward, intuitively seeming to understand that this situation did not call for her presence, but inadvertently tripped over a loose brick in the walkway.

“Shit!” she yelped, then quieted, as if she hadn’t meant to draw attention, as if she were an interloper. It was only then that Mimi seemed to focus on the woman who was standing behind Ezra and certainly then that she registered who exactly it could be. Ezra figured her Doc Martens and wild hair were unavoidable giveaways: Mimi knew he didn’t travel with that type of company, not because he minded, but because the Upper East Side set of her friends (who were now his friends) were the ballet slipper and chunky-highlight types. Most of them had hair that looked exactly like Jennifer Aniston’s, and Ezra wondered just now, possibly for the first time, why they all wanted to resemble one another. Frankie scrambled to her feet, and the four of them stood there silently, tensely, like any small movement or quiet word would turn the whole situation combustible.