“I would really like to go to sleep,” she said.

Ezra lowered himself into a crouch in front of her, then wobbled, then steadied himself.

“No, no, that’s the one thing I know: you can’t go to sleep. If you have to go to sleep, we have to go to the ER.”

“But I did this in Bangkok!” Frankie bleated. Ezra grabbed both of her elbows and pulled her up like she was weightless. She marveled at the feeling: of simply letting someone else literally carry your load. She reminded herself that she had vowed that Ezra Jones was an enemy for life and there had to be something utterly Machiavellian about his behavior.

“Shit, I can’t believe this about Mimi,” he said.

And Frankie said, “Forget Mimi! All you have done is whine about Mimi! Why don’t you take—”

“Don’t start with me about ‘destiny’ and ‘taking charge of my life,’ Frankie,” Ezra snapped. “I’m a grown adult man!”

And Frankie retorted: “Those are all synonyms,” and she thought this was a truly great burn, but Ezra looked at her like she was crazy, so she said, “I have a concussion. What do you want from me?!”

The bouncer shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, then said, “If you’re not coming in, then you can’t clog the door. Fire hazard.”

So Ezra said, “Fine, man, just fine! We were leaving anyway.”

And Frankie yelled, “No, we weren’t. It’s, like, negative thirty degrees out!”

And Ezra said, “It’s not my fault that you didn’t pack for the weather.”

Frankie didn’t have an answer for this, because she wanted to blame him for everything, but alas, on this (and probably on many other things), he was correct.

“Let’s go to Waverly’s,” she said. “I want to see my Boy Scout ex-boyfriend play a hand.”

Ezra squeezed his eyes closed and swung his head back and forth. “No, no, no.”

“So, you’re not the card legend you are rumored to be?”

They were outside now, the snow just starting to fall, the wind swirling, a harbinger of what came next. The ground tilted beneath Frankie, and she reached for a lamppost to steady her.

“I don’t have anything to prove to you,” Ezra said, and even though she knew this was true, she couldn’t keep herself from pushing the point. If her judgment hadn’t been so clouded, maybe she would have considered that part of the reason she kept drawing Ezra into a fight was because something inside of her still sparked around him. But she didn’t see any of this then because that would have been a progression toward clarity, and no one finds clarity from a concussion. “And I told Mimi I wouldn’t gamble again,” Ezra added. “And even if she’s not here, I still keep my promises.” The intimation was there: unlike you. But he was still tap-dancing around confrontation, so he added, just as a buffer, “I mean, it’s not her fault her flight got canceled because of a storm.”