Frankie softened for a moment. She’d heard his mom had died a few years ago. Ovarian cancer, which she’d fought off and on since Ezra was a teen. Ezra was unusually close to her: his dad had left when he was a toddler, and his brother, Henry, older by six years, was busy being a grown-up by then. So it was just the two of them. Frankie used to be jealous of their bond. Even with a deadbeat dad and a mom who was chronically exhausted trying to pay their mortgage while going through treatments, he never doubted his mother’s commitment to him. Her unconditional love for him. When she died, Laila had called and left a message on Frankie’s machine, but she had been in Tokyo with Ashlee Cooper, a young up-and-comer who they thought they could launch in Asia before the States. (Alas, Ashlee developed a raging coke habit before her first single blew up, and she never really made much happen beyond that. Last Frankie had heard, Ashlee was auditioning for the first season of a show that marooned twenty contestants on an island.) By the time Frankie returned from Japan and heard Laila’s message, she told herself that too much time had passed to reach out, and besides, who was she to call him and say how sorry she was? They weren’t friends. They weren’t anything. His mom had always been kind to her, though: pretended not to notice that she snuck into Ezra’s bedroom the times she stayed with them over Thanksgiving or Christmas, went out of her way to send Frankie care packages whenever she sent ones to Ezra, and they always had homemade cookies. I should have called, Frankie thought now, a tickle forming at the back of her nose, a pinch of tears building too. She started to say something—condolences, perhaps—but Ezra cut her off before she could compose herself.

“Holy shit,” Ezra said again. “This is definitely Homer, and this is definitely my old room. And I have absolutely no idea how we got here. Or why.” He looked toward her for an answer, but Frankie happened to glance down at that exact moment and was in a bit of shock herself. In, well, actually a compete spiral, albeit for a totally different reason.

“Holy shit,” Frankie said in reply. She’d just noticed a weight on her left hand, on her ring finger, in fact. A solitaire diamond in a platinum setting.

“HOLY SHIT, EZRA!” she said louder. “Why am I wearing an engagement ring?”

FOUR

Ezra

Ezra could feel his panic rising, and it had just about reached his boiling point. He didn’t know if Frankie remembered this: flushed skin, shallow breathing, tremors in his fingers, all the signs of an oncoming anxiety attack. He was clutching her hand, staring at the ring on her finger—his grandmother’s ring, the one meant for Mimi. And she was clutching his: staring at a band around his own left ring finger, which, until this very moment, he had never seen, much less owned or worn, before in his life.