She thought about calling down to his room. She knew they should probably discuss it, come up with some sort of terms for the rest of the night. But Ezra would never want to get into it, and besides, now Mimi was here, and it was probably easiest to just pretend that whatever had happened . . . hadn’t. They’d each gotten good at that in their own way, and for a long time, Frankie had blamed Ezra. But she could call him now, she could say difficult things, she could ask herself difficult questions. But to what end? For what purpose? He was going to propose to Mimi and that was that.

Frankie righted herself and headed to the bathroom. She peeled off her clothes, the J.Crew fisherman sweater that had been such a comfort a decade ago, the Levi’s from the vintage store that made a decent enough replacement for the Levi’s she’d lived in at Middleton. She stood in front of the vanity mirror naked and marveled at all the ways she could dress herself up: as a pianist in a dress from Bloomingdale’s as a child, as a moody but autonomous college kid in her oversize wool sweaters, as a slick music manager in baby-doll dresses and blazers that she bought at Urban Outfitters on Beverly. Frankie had always loved this notion: that you could cast aside whoever you were before and reinvent yourself into someone entirely new. She’d done it at Middleton so well that maybe Ezra hadn’t even realized what he was getting into. Maybe she hadn’t told him or maybe he didn’t want to know. For a long time, she’d thought this part was important: the blame of it all. Why her parents had used her as a Band-Aid for their marriage, why no one stopped to ask her if she truly loved performing, whether Ezra’s proposal had been an innocent misunderstanding or a grievous fundamental difference between the two of them.

She ran her hands over her hips, up over her breasts, and cradled her cheeks. The steam from the shower was rising, the mirror fogging along with it. Frankie, she couldn’t help but nearly laugh, was disappearing. She’d tell her artists that maybe that lyric was a little too much of a trope, but still, she was astute enough to recognize its prescience. Frankie had always assumed she knew exactly who she was, exactly what she wanted. But what if she’d gotten that wrong? What if, just as Ezra had gotten some things wrong and her parents had gotten things wrong, she had just misunderstood herself? And since she didn’t want to lay blame at her feet for the destruction of her past, maybe she shouldn’t lay blame at their feet either.

This felt heady, too big to embrace right here at the Inn at Middleton, with the shower running and a wedding to get to and a New Year’s Eve to celebrate. But it was fodder, food for thought, and Frankie considered that this was something. This was a start. She wondered now if kissing Ezra out there on Middie Walk wasn’t meant to be closure. They’d never gotten it, or at least she’d never gotten it, even if she’d tricked herself into believing that by running from Middleton to Los Angeles, that by building an expansive, successful existence for herself where she rarely thought of his proposal and the untruths they’d both told themselves about it, she had successfully shed that chapter of her life. So perhaps that’s all the kiss was. She nodded to herself in the mirror through the steamy haze. Closure. No one could blame her for that.