“And did you? Did you tell him?” Frankie asked, though she already knew the answer. Because Mimi was still here, and Ezra still planned to propose and have a future with this woman. Ezra, her Ezra, the lawyer at least, would never have white-knuckled it through a shoplifting charge.

“No,” he said, looking a little embarrassed. “I mean, (a) how was I to know that it was going to last? And (b) he’d been through so much with his mom and all of that, I didn’t want to make anything worse.” He shrugged. “He seemed happy, you know?”

Frankie, who had seen plenty of atrocious behavior over the years, started to defend her. “Look, there are worse things,” she said. Because there were. And though Frankie did have plenty of shit of her own—on that Gregory was correct—one of her few redeeming qualities was that she did not judge. She didn’t judge her clients’ drug indulgences, she didn’t judge Ezra’s panic attacks, she didn’t even judge Mimi’s shoplifting habits. If she stood in judgment, she also knew she’d have plenty to answer for, and really, it was easier not to. She reiterated: “I mean, it’s not my business, but again, there are really worse things in the world.”

“Well, sure. Like turning down his proposal hours before he was set to graduate and then abandoning him for his move to New York.”

“Oh, fuck off, Gregory,” Frankie snapped. “I never planned to go to New York with him. He just never heard me when I tried to tell him.”

Gregory fell silent and turned back toward where campus stood in the distance.

“Come on,” he said finally, slipping his arm through hers, as if they were linked now, though Frankie didn’t know by what. “Don’t you have a bridesmaid’s dress to put on? And we have a new century to greet. And I, for one, could use a drink.”

Frankie didn’t bother saying she was sober. After last night, that felt like a technicality. Or maybe that was worse: that she went ahead and made such a mess of everything here and had nothing and no one to blame but herself.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ezra

THREE THIRTY P.M.

Mimi kissed him as soon as the door swung closed. And really kissed him, which Ezra certainly didn’t mind but wasn’t really like her if he were being honest with himself. But for a good thirty seconds, as his hand snaked its way up her shirt and then under her bra, he wasn’t—wasn’t honest with himself, that is.

She tugged her shirt over her head. “I’m going to remind you how much you missed me,” she said, her voice low and breathy. “I’m going to blast that girl’s name right out of your head forever.”

Ezra pulled his lips off her neck. “What? Who? Frankie?” And then he remembered how not even half an hour ago, he was kissing Frankie. His brain buzzed with static, and he wished he’d brought a second Xanax, but then who could have known what a mess he’d make?