“Thank you,” Joni whispered, and Frankie thought she might cry.

“This really had nothing to do with you,” she said, and she started to explain, but there was so much, too much, and Frankie didn’t even have an honest grasp of it herself.

After she’d told Ezra about the pregnancy, which she hadn’t even meant to do really, he became even more Ezra than he usually was—already determined to be the most wonderful father to their zygote. Neither of them had good paternal role models, though hers had promised that he would sit nicely with her mother at graduation, even if her mom showed up with Fred. Frankie didn’t think she should be the one to tell him that her mom and Fred had split up (and furthermore, Fred had never been the problem in her parents’ marriage), and besides, she was done with their grown-up things. But he would show up, she trusted that, because even if her dad were absent and distracted, he wasn’t terrible. He loved her, and Frankie, both then and now, knew their problems didn’t stem from her parents’ lack of love for her. There was loads of other stuff, just like with Ezra.

Frankie couldn’t really articulate why Ezra became so frenzied in the weeks that followed after she broke down in Steinway and told him. She herself had only taken the positive test a few hours prior, so she didn’t know what she needed, what she wanted. No, that wasn’t true. Even a decade later, she knew that wasn’t true. She sat at the piano bench before he found her, her fingers lilting over the keys but never catching flight, never making a sound, and understood intrinsically that she could not, would not have this child.

And then she told Ezra, and he started making plans for their future. The pregnancy test wasn’t even dry.

“You’ll move to New York with me,” he said when they had wandered out of their dorm for dinner at the dining hall, though Frankie had lost her appetite. She thought he sounded genuinely happy. “I don’t have to live with Henry. It will be the two of us, then the three of us.”

“I didn’t realize this was something I wanted,” he said one night in her room while she started packing up her books into cardboard boxes. “But now, I can see how it makes so much sense.”

And Frankie made small protestations. She said she didn’t think the job at Sony (which had not yet been offered to her but she’d led with the lie and it’d snowballed) would let her transfer to New York. She half-heartedly shrugged when Ezra suggested they call a real estate agent to find them a rental near NYU. She taped up her boxes and used a Sharpie to label them and never once really considered doing any of that.

She called her mom and told her, and her mom did something right for once: she gasped and said, “Oh, honey.” Then she fell silent for a long minute and said: “What can I do to help? You have your whole life in front of you, and I don’t regret being a young mom for a second, but I don’t get the sense that it’s for you.” And Frankie cried, truly sobbed, because that’s all she had wanted to hear from Ezra, an understanding that she was in over her head here, and instead of telling her what he was going to do, maybe he should have asked what she wanted.