“No,” she said with such certainty that Ezra was genuinely embarrassed in front of his friends, even if he was irate with them, even if some of them—well, ok, Frankie—were not his friends at all. “No! I didn’t even want to come here! I left my one vacation week with my family for this. And now I hear that not one day after you’re back with old friends . . . you’re gambling. And, you’re with her.”

She gestured to Frankie, who said, “Hey! I’m not part of this.”

But Mimi rolled her eyes and said to Ezra, “You and I had an agreement.”

Ezra did not interject here because she was right: he had understood her terms from the start—loyalty and honesty, and he had been happy to live with them because those were his terms too. It didn’t seem like the right time to raise the outstanding question as to why she was inexplicably lying about missing her flight. He didn’t care if she’d been late or distracted or . . . Ezra couldn’t think of another reason she wouldn’t have landed last night. It didn’t matter! He forgave her! He just wanted to slip the ring on her finger at midnight and move on from all of this! Why was it so hard to move on from all of this?

Mimi had turned to go, and Ezra started to protest, but Gregory touched his outstretched arm and said, “Friend, we should probably have a talk.” And Ezra was tired, he was so goddamned tired, so he simply watched Mimi leave, and with that, everything that Ezra had planned on, had planned for, disappeared.

THIRTY-THREE

Frankie

NINE FORTY-FIVE P.M.

Frankie was beginning to think that Steinway Auditorium was actually cursed. Maybe it had been built on sacred burial grounds or maybe it was just infested with significantly awful juju (she lived in LA; she believed these things from time to time whenever the notion struck her), because she had never gotten out of this godforsaken building without a spiral of shit going down.

They were back at the reception now. Gregory and Ezra were huddled in a corner, and Frankie desperately wanted to eavesdrop but instead lingered by the buffet, which had opened while they were all backstage churning up baggage from a decade ago. She gnawed on a rubbery piece of sirloin and watched Laila make a lap around the dance floor, likely looking for Alec Barstow, who really had disappeared entirely. Frankie wondered if they should file a police report, but she didn’t want to incriminate herself with the campus police, and besides, she couldn’t remember the rest of the story anyway. Then she noticed Joni looking shaky while busing discarded dishes, and she called to her, “Joni, you don’t understand, this has nothing to do with you. We were a mess long before this.”

Joni tried to look reassured, but Frankie could tell she didn’t believe her. It was easy, necessary, to think that grown-ups got their lives together after college. To learn that life remained as messy at thirty-two as it was at twenty-two was to shatter the illusion that came with post-graduation dreams. Frankie walked over to her, and above the hum of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” she placed a hand on her arm and said, “Joni, it’s going to be ok. Really. If you’re ever in LA or need a job or could use some help, will you call me?” She had a business card in her wallet and placed it in the pocket of Joni’s starched white shirt.