The opening intro to the song was unmistakable, and Frankie felt her stomach fall out. She could see the notes in her mind as clearly as she could see April and Connor in front of her. Bono’s unmistakable voice cut through the auditorium, and in no time at all, she was back in the bathroom of Lemonhead, and Ezra was bursting through the door because he had been looking for her everywhere.

See the stone set in your eyes

Frankie stared out into the darkened auditorium where Ezra had fled maybe an hour or so ago. She’d lost track of time since. She closed her eyes and listened to the music and the low electric buzz of her friends on the stage where she’d avoided so much for so long.

I can’t live, with or without you.

And then Frankie Harriman remembered everything.

THIRTY-SIX

Ezra

ELEVEN P.M.

Bruno called the campus shuttle, which was still operating on New Year’s Eve, and Ezra gave Mimi the room keys. He’d find somewhere else to sleep for the night, he told her. He said to book whatever flight she wanted back home or whichever train she needed if she wanted to go to their apartment in New York instead. He’d pay for it. He didn’t want to make this any more difficult than it had to be on her. It had already gotten so difficult.

“I think you’re going to regret this,” she sniffed, before she walked through the revolving door into the frigid Berkshire air and to the waiting driver. “I think you’re going to call me tomorrow and want me back.”

Ezra didn’t know what was kinder: to tell her that she was wrong or to give her hope that she wasn’t. But he knew that he would not.

Instead, he said, “Mimi, I am truly sorry for all of this. I never wanted things to go this way.”

And she gave him a long look like she didn’t believe him, which she probably didn’t, because this had been his choice, and he just as well could have chosen differently. He could have chosen to still get down on one knee and slip his grandmother’s ring on her finger and call her boisterous family in Kansas City with the news and try to reach Henry in London to tell him too. And they probably would have had a perfectly fine life together, even if they hadn’t actually been the perfect match he’d always assumed them to be. Ezra realized this, but he also realized that he was capable of asking for more than perfectly fine—that he desperately wanted more. He’d been chasing a big, expansive, intoxicating love since he was old enough to seek it. And how he’d convinced himself that anyone simply loving him in return was the same thing as openhearted, mountain-moving adoration, he didn’t know. He didn’t have it in him, there in Burton Library with Bruno looking on and Mimi falling apart, to dive into that sort of emotional autopsy. It was enough, for now, to know that he needed to let Mimi go. That he could stop chasing her, stop holding on so tightly to all his plans, because what he was really chasing was something else.