Holy hell, this was turning into a ten-alarm fire.

She refocused. One problem at a time.

“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.

Ezra was sitting on a concrete step outside Homer, its brick facade glimmering in the snow, and muttering, “My eyes, my eyes, my eyes,” his breath puffing out into clouds in front of him. Ezra had always been a bit of a hypochondriac, which in hindsight might have just been a cry for someone to take care of him. That had never been her strong suit, back then, maybe not now either. But today, Frankie, in a moment of genuine pity, wrapped Ezra’s coat over his shoulders and sat beside him to rub his back.

It was odd, she thought, touching him again. With no memory of the night before, this was essentially the first time she’d made contact with Ezra Jones in a decade. A third of her life, really. A significant enough swath of time that he felt like both a stranger and also a familiar puzzle piece that clicked so easily into place. They’d fallen in love organically, simply, like learning a song stanza by stanza.

The night she sidled up to him at the bar at Lemonhead, he’d told her that she was the easiest person to talk to he’d ever met, that she made him want to tell her his secrets. Frankie remembered being flattered: she had been called many things, but amiable and approachable had never been among them. And he was easy to talk to too: like someone she needed to know, like someone who made her like herself more than she realized she could. And so she decided that they were going to be great friends, and they had been. They spent the remainder of their sophomore year swapping stories at the library or splitting buttered bagels while they crammed for their art history exams (they discovered they were in the same lecture), and once Bethany dumped him that spring, they metaphorically leaned closer and closer into each other like magnets until there was no space between them. And they stayed that way until they didn’t, the day of graduation.

Now, Frankie’s hand worked in concentric circles over his shoulder blades, and she reminded herself that this was a temporary balm, a short-lasting kindness. She did not want to be entwined with Ezra again. She had new people with whom to swap her stories, to share her secrets. She couldn’t think of any at the moment, but she was sure that she did all the same.

Then she remembered the ring. Rings. Plural. She pressed her eyes closed and tried, tried to recollect what had happened. She met Laila in the lobby, and they’d taxied over to Lemonhead—the hotel, set back from campus and newly built for high-end donors and guest lecturers, was too far a walk even in Doc Martens. They ordered drinks, and Frankie was proud of herself for starting with a club soda. They toasted to seeing each other again. She had a vague image of the bar: not much had changed in the ensuing decade, but then students hadn’t flocked there for the dingy decor. Rather, they were liberal with their ID policy, and pitchers of beer were five bucks. The floor was still sticky from spilled drinks; the pleather on the backs of the booth seats still crackled beneath their weight; the light was still dim enough to conceal all sorts of misdeeds. It was oddly crowded for winter break, but then plenty of students opted to stick around over the holidays—either by choice or by circumstance. Frankie had been one of them until she started going home with Ezra instead. Middleton forged new families—she wasn’t so many years out that she didn’t remember that.