Years later, on the same stage, Frankie watched Ezra and Gregory grow animated in the corner where, presumably, Gregory was informing her ex-boyfriend that his current girlfriend was a thief. We all hide a whole manner of sins from one another, Frankie thought. And maybe the key to successfully loving someone wasn’t to judge them for their sins, but rather to ask how we could soothe the pains those afflictions cause one another. Mimi didn’t steal things because she needed to; she did it as a panacea for something deeper. Frankie didn’t push people away because it served her; she did it because loneliness was a safer space than emotional vulnerability. And Ezra—Frankie almost started to cry at this realization. Ezra wasn’t overprotective because he thought that she or Mimi or anyone was breakable; he was overprotective because what he really needed was someone looking out for him instead. His mother was gone; his father was gone. And maybe what he’d needed from Frankie back then wasn’t a baby but the assurance of companionship. She could have told him that she didn’t want to move to New York with him, even before the positive pregnancy test. She could have told him that she was twenty-two and selfish and wanted to sort out her own life. Instead, she hinted and she obfuscated, and she waited for him to give her what she needed instead of just talking honestly with him. She needed space. She needed freedom. She needed to figure out who she was after being told throughout childhood who she was predestined to be and still not having a firm grasp on it after four years of college. Frankie didn’t think there was anything wrong with this—who, really, knew who they were going to be for the rest of their lives at twenty-two?

Maybe Ezra did. He was going to be a lawyer and work his way up through the firm so that he never had to worry about money and also build a logical, linear, reassuring existence where bad things didn’t happen that he couldn’t control like his dad leaving when he was three and his mom getting ovarian cancer.

It dawned on Frankie now, as she saw Gregory throw his hands in the air, and then Ezra turn and march down the steps from the stage and along the left aisle of the auditorium toward the exit, that the only people who knew who they were going to be at twenty-two were people like her mother and father: parents. Her mom had aspirations well beyond giving birth at twenty and then mothering Frankie until she was old enough to have a life of her own. And Frankie knew this wasn’t her fault, that her mom had been stunted. But it had happened all the same; once you had a child, you were a parent forever, and at twenty-two, Frankie knew that she wasn’t ready to sacrifice for such things.

Gregory saw her staring and pushed through the dance floor toward her.