But then Ezra remembered that Connor had asked one of his Middleton hockey teammates, Alec Barstow, to get ordained online, which sounded completely preposterous, but Connor swore it was legit.

“Mimi?” Frankie asked flatly.

“My girlfriend? Obviously.”

“You planned to ask her to marry you at April and Connor’s wedding?” Frankie made a face like he should know better.

“No,” he said. “I did not plan on asking her to marry me at a wedding. I was planning on—afterward—” He stopped. He didn’t need to justify himself to his college girlfriend.

“Oh,” she said, but said it like: ooooooooh, a guise of understanding riddled with sarcasm. “The gesture grandé. Your specialty.”

“Hey.” He held up a finger. “Do not.”

“Do not what?”

It was true that Ezra had long been a fan of a grand gesture. A decade ago, he’d probably overcompensated for his feelings for Frankie by using any opportunity to go big. The time he’d brought Paris to her behind their dorm; the ill-fated, heady decision in front of Burton Library that led to their destruction; the hotel room he booked the night he was certain they were going to sleep together for the first time. It was one of those quaint B and Bs because his only other choice was the Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of town, and even if Ezra didn’t understand Frankie in the ways that he wanted to by then, he knew well enough that she’d grown up in a four- or five-star hotel kind of way. So he put the room on his close-to-maxed-out card, and scrambled around lighting too many candles and tossing literal rose petals on the duvet, and he cued up music from Sade because Frankie had once said that her songs were “pure sex.” Frankie arrived after her last lecture, just as dusk was settling in, and he swung open the door, ready to woo her, and she took it all in and tilted her head, laughed, then said, “Is this all just to get me to sleep with you? Ez, I would have done that in the dorm.” Then she took off all of her clothes and pulled him on top of the rose-petaled duvet.

“Well, thank goodness, Mimi isn’t you,” he said now, his voice dull. “So please do not insert your opinion where it isn’t welcome.”

Indeed, Mimi, like Ezra, loved a grand gesture—she’d been clear on that from the night they met when they were deemed “100% compatible” by a questionnaire they both filled out at a work event she was hosting. A proposal at midnight of the new millennium would be exactly what she wanted. He didn’t have to stand here and explain all this to the woman who wouldn’t get that in the first place.

“Anyway,” Ezra continued, “later. Not at the wedding.”

“Shit!” Frankie yelped, already over it. “The wedding! What time is it? I can’t be late!”

The wedding. The reason they were back on campus in the first place. April and Connor worked here now—April taught nineteenth-century literature, and Connor was the assistant coach for the Division 2 hockey team. When Ezra got the invite, he thought of Frankie briefly—Will she be there?—but Frankie had such a big life in Los Angeles, so far removed from most of their social circle, that he didn’t linger on the worry of seeing her again.