“So security took me into their little back room and I had to sign some forms saying I wouldn’t come back there for a year, and blah blah blah.” She made a face like this was an inconvenience to her, not actually a crime. “It took forever, and I missed the flight, ok? And it felt much easier to just show up today, but maybe I shouldn’t have done that either because, my God, no good deed goes unpunished!”

“What was the good deed?” Ezra asked. He couldn’t even imagine.

“I came here because you didn’t want to do this alone.” She considered this then laughed. “Which is ironic since you were actually doing it with her.”

Ezra fell quiet. Then: “I wanted you here because I was going to ask you to marry me. At midnight. For the millennium.”

Behind him, he heard Bruno whisper, “Jeeesus,” and he turned, and Bruno said, “Sorry, man.”

When he turned back, Mimi was frozen, her mouth agape, her eyes wide.

“What?”

“I was going to ask you to marry me,” he said again, and he honestly thought he might cry. He knew the ring in his pocket was never going to be on her finger; he knew that this was all about to end.

“Wait,” Mimi whispered, her voice hoarse from yelling. “Wait! Please, you can still ask! I didn’t mean to screw it all—”

Ezra waved a hand, cutting her off. “I can’t, Mimi. I can’t.”

“Because I sometimes take things?” She was crying again, the rage sucked out of her. “Because, I mean, sometimes, I want things that aren’t mine?”

Ezra felt something splinter in him. It wasn’t so bad that she wanted things that weren’t hers. But no one was owed anything in this world, and he, more than most, had learned this lesson through simply living. He ran his hands over his face, blew out his breath. This would be the moment to confess his own omissions, the mess of last night, waking up with Frankie in Homer. But maybe they’d done enough damage to each other in the past few hours. He didn’t want to hurt her any more than he had to, didn’t want to make this any messier than it already was.

“Please, Ezra, come on. I like the life we’ve built,” she pleaded. “I’ll stop. You stopped playing poker for me, and I’ll stop this for you.”

It occurred to Ezra that for all of his years, he’d assumed that loving someone meant sacrifice. Whether it was because his mom sacrificed so much of herself by marrying a shitty man who left them or whether it was simply because that’s just how he’d moved through the world, doling out small pieces of himself whenever someone asked him to. Never stopping to consider whether or not this was a part of himself he wanted to relinquish. But what if it didn’t have to? What if loving someone meant enhancing your life, not subtracting from it?