They’d been best friends since the early winter of their sophomore year—even then, he was a serial monogamist who had split with his high school girlfriend the summer before Middleton (well, she’d split from him) and then committed to a flighty girl named Bethany. Frankie had plopped down next to him one night at the bar at Lemonhead, every student’s favorite drinking joint, and said: “I’m not a therapist, but you look like you need some life advice,” and he surprised himself and told her everything: about Bethany’s odd disappearances for days at a time, about his mother’s newly returned cancer. And Frankie said, “Well, if this is like where we spill our darkest secrets, I guess I can tell you, stranger, that my mom is 99 percent having an affair with my old piano teacher?” Ezra remembered that she said it like a question but then recalibrated and said, “No, she definitely is. She 100 percent is fucking him.” And he really didn’t know what to say, because what he wanted most in his world was to veer away from any messiness, and here was this girl who simply purged her messiness onto the bar. When he didn’t reply, she clicked her tongue and said, “Yeah, but anyway, I don’t understand why you’re with a girl who seems to have very few redeeming qualities? Just, like, to be with someone? That doesn’t seem healthy.” She was blunt, even back then.

Gregory had been hovering nearby, and he poked his chin between them and said, “Oh, hey, I’m Gregory, not Greg, just Gregory, and for the record, you—you’re Frankie, right?—you are totally right, and Ez, really, you’ll be ok if you dump her because it’s not the end of the world if you’re single, ok?”

Frankie had lit up at being validated, her eyebrows raised, the edges of her grin pointing northward too, and Ezra decided right then that she could be good for him, even with her messiness, even with her blunt force. She added, just to drive the point home: “Yeah, what are you even doing with her, with your life? Don’t you know that you’re in control of your own destiny?”

And then someone cued up “You Give Love a Bad Name” on the jukebox, and everyone behind them cheered, so Frankie dragged a reluctant Ezra to the dance floor, where they all screamed the chorus so loudly the walls shook.

“So . . . you don’t remember last night?” Ezra said now, twelve years after they’d first met, more gently than before because he didn’t know what other tack to take here. Frankie scowled, but then she was never particularly good at acknowledging mistakes. Much less apologizing for them. “We couldn’t have . . . gotten married,” Ezra continued. “I only had that ring on me because . . . it’s for Mimi. And now you . . . I mean . . . No . . . it’s impossible. Besides, where would we have done that . . . here?” He waved a hand as if to acknowledge this idyllic gem of a college town in Western Massachusetts, which had three bed-and-breakfasts and a used bookstore and a bakery that specialized in cinnamon buns but certainly no all-night wedding chapels. “It’s not exactly Vegas.”