He tapped his fingers in a pattern over the desk, unable to slow his brain. The more he thought about it, the more outraged he was at Frankie. She had kissed him! As an experiment! Like he was a frog in biology class who she had the luxury of poking and prodding until she just sliced him straight open. Ezra so rarely found himself angry, but instantly, immediately, he felt a burst of fury run through him. His cheeks ran hot; his guts roiled. He wanted to recoil from the feeling—Ezra was not in the habit of leaning into his rage—and inexplicably, he found that he could not. It was there, like a fever, pulsing stronger and stronger with each heartbeat.

He reached for the phone to call her room, to tell her . . . well, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to tell her, but he figured he would work it out when the moment came. Something about her selfishness and her audacity and that he was not a frog there for her dissection! But then he heard the shower turn off behind the bathroom door, and he tried to ease the phone back into its cradle as quietly as possible. He didn’t want to lie to Mimi any more than he’d already done. What he wanted was to go back in time and refuse Gregory’s alcohol and certainly skip the Xanax and have a perfectly normal evening out with his old college friends that didn’t involve Frankie Harriman.

He told himself that he could still make this right. That all he had to do was get through a few more hours, and then he’d never have to think about Frankie again. But his anger churned in his belly, and he wondered, if Frankie did dissect him like a frog, if she’d open up his insides and find a red-hot bomb of rage. Then Mimi emerged from the bathroom, and he tried to swallow this all down, as if you could do such a thing with a ticking time bomb, as if he weren’t poised to explode.

TWENTY-NINE

Frankie

Frankie lay on her bed with a pillow over her face and replayed the scenes from the past hour again and again, starting with the kiss and ending with the hotel’s revolving doors that gulped up Mimi and Ezra without even a glance back. Then she flung the pillow across the room and pressed her hand over her mouth in astonishment. She had willingly kissed, truly kissed, Ezra Jones. Forget being married, forget the rest of it. She had been sober and cogent and still possibly concussed (but definitely recovering), and she had leaned into him, raised her face to his, and kissed him. And Ezra! He had kissed her back. Sober and cogent and all the rest of it. She wasn’t sure if she were unsettled or comforted by the unexpected turn of events; for Frankie, those two sentiments were so closely aligned that maybe they were interchangeable.