“It’s fine,” Frankie said. “We don’t have to.”

Ezra narrowed and locked his eyes with hers. “Yes, we do. You promised.”

So Frankie nodded, and because she was used to cajoling people into doing things in the name of music, she said, “Can we just have five minutes? He’ll give you fifty bucks.” And Ezra shrugged and said, “Absolutely,” then smiled at Frankie like she was brilliant. She wasn’t. She just knew how to manipulate the weak spots. Still though, his smile, that smile: it was like it was made just for her, like she was the only person who saw him, like he was the only person who saw her too.

Ezra pulled the cash from his wallet, then stumbled for no reason at all, and the custodian said, “Just don’t make a mess. We’re setting up for an event.” And they each assured him that they would not. Music wasn’t messy after all, though the heart of it, the guts of it—Frankie’s, at least—were something else entirely. Nothing but mess, really.

The grand piano wasn’t center stage, which meant that if they were really going to do this, if Ezra was going to force her to keep her end of the bet, they were going to have to find an upright in one of the rooms backstage.

Frankie stopped at the bottom of the steps, while Ezra patted his pockets in search of his phone, which he hadn’t yet realized had been crushed by the Zamboni. “Shit, I really need to call Mimi,” he said. Then, as if the thought were there then gone, he turned to Frankie. “Come on. Let’s do this.”

“I really don’t want to,” she whispered.

“I know,” Ezra said. “And that is why we’re doing it.” He was amazingly coherent for someone who was also well over the legal limit of intoxicated.

Frankie thought she might cry, but she had promised, and she wasn’t going to give Ezra any reason to accuse her of being the same person she’d been a decade ago. She’d grown! She was an adult! She managed the number one girl band in the world! She told herself all these things while she ascended the steps with heavy legs and then wound her way backstage. Of course, neither of them had been back here since the day in early May a decade ago when she’d watched the pregnancy test turn blue. They walked side by side in silence.

The two weeks between the test and graduation were agony. Frankie knew now that they were agony for the both of them, but she, at the time, could think only of herself. She doubled down on the lie about the job offer in LA: it didn’t matter if it were true or not; what mattered was that Ezra believed it, and actually, Frankie came to believe it too. She called up her father’s travel agent and booked a one-way ticket the night of graduation, and if she could have left sooner, she would have. Ezra refused to acknowledge that they couldn’t find a way to make it work. She knew that he couldn’t give up NYU and his scholarship money, which she found reassuring: she hadn’t wanted him to recalibrate his whole life for her, and she’d never have expected it. And perhaps that was part of the reason she was so irritated that he wanted as much from her. With each passing day, it became clearer and clearer to Frankie that their two mostly happy years had been pure luck, and they were so diametrically different—all Frankie wanted for her future was freedom, and all Ezra wanted was security.