She boarded the late-evening flight to Los Angeles and stared out the window for a solid six hours, her Walkman keeping her company, a mixtape that she had made months back that reminded her of Ezra echoing in her ears. They landed at midnight, and Frankie stopped to pee in the airport bathroom. Her underwear was dotted with bright red blood. She dropped a dime in the tampon machine for a maxi pad, and when she woke up the next morning in the hotel room that she’d put on her dad’s credit card, the last vestiges of Ezra Jones had emptied from her.

She called him a week later and said tersely: “I don’t want to make this any more drawn out than it needs to be. I’m not pregnant. It was all a mistake.”

And Ezra went silent for a long time, like he sometimes used to when they would linger on the phone on those hot summer nights when they were just falling in love and sharing all their secrets. Then finally he said, “Ok, well, it’s done.”

And that was the last they spoke of it until ten years later when a wedding reunited them back at the place where it all began.

Frankie hadn’t thought about any of this in so long, but last night, as Ezra steadied her up the steps to the stage of Steinway, then back to the music rooms behind it, the unresolved pain of their decimating ending came back in a rush. She would have done so much of it differently. If only she had known how. She wouldn’t have married him. But maybe she would have been less angry, maybe she could have been less selfish. And as she flipped on a light to a practice room and found an upright there, she gazed into his open face and understood that he would have done the same. They’d both been greedy back then, and now, she knew, they were both sorry.

She sat heavily on the bench in front of her, and Ezra, surprisingly, plopped down beside her. She’d never, in the span of her life, shared a piano bench with anyone other than the times when Fred got close enough that she could smell his spearmint gum and his aftershave, which she came to associate with her mom. And her instinct was to shove Ezra off, to tell him to give her some goddamned space, but she squelched that voice because there was something fragile between them now, and she didn’t want to break it.

“Any requests?” she asked.

“I just want to listen,” he replied. His eyes were already closed, and he swayed a little, and Frankie found it endearing. Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit.

There was a beanbag in the corner, and as soon as Frankie’s fingers found the keys—stiff at first because she was so out of practice—Ezra rose and curled up on top of it. She played a made-up melody; she didn’t want to be cheesy and play something from her old mix-tapes: U2 or Pat Benatar or Tina Turner or Prince. She could have played any of them because she saw the notes in front of her like she always did. But she thought she heard Ezra lightly snoring, so she played something of her own, something original because he was half-asleep, and also, she trusted herself to show him. To be honest. Not to hide behind anyone else’s version of a masterpiece. Frankie played longer than she’d planned to—she’d talked herself into just one composition, but then time stood still and, just like she used to, she got swallowed up in the notes and the melody and the beauty of making something from nothing, just with your fingers and your heart and the ivory keys. She’d forgotten that once, maybe only at the beginning but indeed once, she’d loved it. And it wasn’t that it felt good to abandon herself to it again—it was painful and bittersweet, but it was wonderful too, like waking something inside of her that had been dormant and now was ready to emerge from hibernation.