“Hey,” he said, stepping toward her. “Whatever it is, I’m here.”

Frankie took a long look at him. Then hiccupped.

“I’m not moving to New York,” she said. “I should have told you that earlier. I mean, I tried to. Really. But I shouldn’t have pretended otherwise. I wanted to make you happy.” She shrugged. “But I’m moving to LA.”

Ezra felt a shock to his system. Even ten years later, with his grandmother’s ring in his palm and Mimi out front onstage waiting for him, he could remember that. How he felt like the bottom was falling out.

“What? Wait, LA?” Ezra tried to recalculate, recalibrate. Whether he could go with her, but he knew he couldn’t; why would she suddenly have such a change of heart, if it had been changed at all?

She stood quickly. “This isn’t how I wanted to tell you.”

“This is why you were crying at Burton? Because you are going to LA?” Ezra tried to take comfort in that. “We can fly back and forth; we’ll make it work.”

Her eyes found his. No, it was more than that. He understood this intuitively. It would take a wrecking ball to break Frankie Harriman, so whatever it was, it was about significantly more than putting three thousand miles between them.

“Do you . . . I mean . . . is it for a job?” Ezra asked.

Frankie nodded. “Yes.”

“One you can’t do from New York?” He paused. None of this was making any sense.

“I tried to tell you,” she said again. “I can’t go back there. I can’t live the life that my parents did; I don’t want the life my parents had.” Her voice elevated and cracked.

He stepped toward her, ran his hands over her shoulders, then down her arms.

“Frankie, we’re nothing like your parents. Who ever said that we have to be anything like them?”

Her face fell again, and he saw her fight it but she couldn’t, and then she started to cry.

“Ezra,” she said, right before she dropped the bomb that would change everything. “I’m pregnant.”

Tonight, on New Year’s Eve, at April and Connor’s wedding, Ezra remembered all of this. He remembered how weeks later, and even months and years after, he would wonder if she would have told him. If he hadn’t tracked her down at Steinway, if he hadn’t tried to help. Even after their ugly split, he’d wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but with Frankie, that wasn’t easy, and Ezra resented her for never making it so.

He wove his way through the catering stations backstage, knowing she was right behind him but keeping her distance so they could reemerge at the party and not cause a scene. Well, Frankie may have wanted a scene, but he had enough on his plate and firmly did not.

“Ezra?” He heard a different voice from a few feet away.

He turned, and there was Joni, the barista from the coffee shop this morning, in a white shirt and black pants and her hair pulled into a proper low bun, hoisting a tray of what appeared to be mini quiches.