The first time Ezra had invited her home, it had been Christmas break, they’d been together for four months, they were seamless in the way that early love is. After they first slept together in the B and B that Ezra had splurged on—a memory that Frankie revisited now for the first time in years, flooding her cheeks with heat—they wanted always to be naked, and when they weren’t naked, they wanted always to be together. At lectures, in the library, at the dining hall. It didn’t matter. The span of a two-week break felt interminably long to the both of them, and Frankie’s parents were splintering by then: she couldn’t bear to decamp to West Palm Beach, where they spent most Christmases, and be the glue that held her parents together.

Frankie was surprised to remember this now—how easy it had been to say yes to spending break with him, how easy the two weeks had been in a home that wasn’t hers. She was a near-professional at performing for strangers, even several years after quitting performing entirely, but she found that his mom asked for no artifice, and Ezra demanded even less of it.

“Just you,” he would say. “Just you.”

That holiday break, he’d suggested ice skating. There was a pond over in Bryn Mawr that was shallow enough to freeze by mid-December, and all the local kids made an event out of it: the first skate out. Frankie could borrow his mom’s skates, Ezra had said. Someone always set up speakers and a boom box and blasted whatever was charting on the radio. And someone else always inevitably sold hot chocolate for a quarter, fifty cents if you wanted marshmallows.

But Frankie had never learned to skate. She didn’t explain the why of it because she wasn’t yet ready to trust anyone with her history—it had been because she’d had one singular focus in childhood, and anything beyond that, any childhood things, were simply not on the docket. She’d barely even told him that she played piano by that point, by that magical Christmas. When he suggested that they head to the pond for the evening, she shook her head and burst into tears. It had to be the first time he’d seen her cry. It was one of the last times too, in fact.

He told her that he didn’t care if she were the world’s worst ice skater; he didn’t care if she dug her fingers into his elbow or spent the bulk of the evening on her butt. He thought it would be amazingly endearing if either of those proved true. But Frankie simply would not budge. She didn’t want to learn something new; she didn’t want to be the only one at the pond who looked like a fool. Later, Ezra realized that what she really meant was: I only like to do something when I am the best at it.

They agreed to go to the movies instead. They saw Moonstruck, and Frankie had laughed until she got a cramp in her side. But he made her promise that she would take lessons at Abel Rink, Middleton’s hockey arena, when they got back. She didn’t know why he cared, why that was so important to him.