She’d run to Steinway straightaway. She didn’t know why, didn’t ask herself to consider why. It didn’t matter. Looking back, she doubted it was because music brought her peace or comfort or any of those trite little statements that therapists would say. Because it didn’t. But she’d been trained to retreat into it, and it was a long time, maybe until tonight at the wedding, that Frankie understood retreating was not at all the same thing as seeking. Frankie retreated to Steinway because she used music, her music, as a crutch. Not as a balm. And those were two different things entirely. For all of her formative years, up until Middleton, music had filled every emotion for her: pain, stress, loneliness, and yes, even joy. Frankie had loved piano for a while; she knew that to be true too. But it was so all-consuming for her, at least until she walked away, that she couldn’t differentiate between any of those feelings: she was like a newborn who screamed at everything because she couldn’t tell when she was hungry, when she was scared, when she just wanted someone to hold her.

So she’d found herself onstage alone at the piano bench. As she too often found herself as a child. Only now she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted any of it, and she was determined not to be a passenger in her life any longer. Wasn’t that the whole point of rejecting Juilliard or a conservatory or the path of a professional musician? Of telling Fred and her mother to go fuck themselves when they begged her to attend Aspen? Of hanging up on her father when he’d called her to ask what it would take—as if she were waiting on a bribe—for her to rejoin the competition circuit just before she left for her freshman year? All she wanted her life through was to be left to her own choices. She’d decided that at seventeen, and she’d never regretted it. She’d defied expectations; she’d pointed herself toward the unknown, even when it terrified her. This was why she’d abandoned her music, and unlike her mom, she wasn’t going to put all of that aside for a baby, for a man, not even for a good man.

Tonight, at April and Connor’s reception, all of this rushed back in one unwelcome memory. She was upset all over again at Ezra, for forcing her to dredge this up when she’d spent the better part of a decade forgetting it, pretending none of this had happened.

Out front, the DJ dropped “Y.M.C.A.,” and Frankie heard the guests let out a cheer.

She didn’t see Ezra at first, so she wound further into the hallways, where the bustle from the catering staff had slowed, peering in one dressing room door, then another.

“Frankie.” His voice rose up behind her, and she jumped. She’d missed him in the sea of waiters, but there he was, just like he’d been ten years ago. He looked handsome, flawless in his tuxedo, like nothing from his life had stuck to him. His face had fully recovered from the pepper spray, and she couldn’t help but think that Ezra looked a little bit like a movie star.