Today, Ezra watched Frankie shake her blond hair free of damp snowflakes and wondered if Mimi hadn’t been right all along, that part of him wanted her there as protection, as a shield against Frankie Harriman. But Ezra truly hadn’t known if Frankie would even attend: her showing up to celebrate a life event for old friends, much less as a willing bridesmaid, felt totally out of character, and while there were a slew of surprises to behold this morning, it only just dawned on him that one of the biggest was that Frankie opted back into their circle.

Frankie swung open the door to the coffee shop, and the heat assaulted them.

“Oh, thank the sweet Lord,” Frankie said, more to herself than to him. “Heat and sustenance. I’d forgotten how cold it is here. LA is seventy degrees any day of the year.”

“I need to call the hotel,” Ezra said.

“I can’t do anything without caffeine,” Frankie said. “Can we agree, drinks first, call second?”

Ezra acquiesced. He could really use some coffee, and besides, what was he going to say? Hello, I may be married, but if I’m not, please accept my grandmother’s engagement ring?

Frankie scooted out a chair for him, he plopped down, and she went to the counter.

He didn’t bother telling her what to order: it was exactly what he’d always gotten, and he assumed she knew as much. Ezra never cared much about change, which he thought was overrated. He liked what he liked; he was who he was. Frankie, though, had always been like an impressionist painting: different from every angle, different in each light. But Ezra was just Ezra. He liked his coffee with a splash of cream and one sugar, and it had been that way since he was eighteen and started drinking coffee once he was done growing. He’d read research that caffeine could stunt your growth, and he was nothing if not a faithful abider of the rules.

Frankie returned to the table, pushed the to-go cup his way.

“Splash of cream, one sugar.” She also got two buttered bagels.

“Hasn’t changed.” He nodded.

She raised her eyebrows as if to say: I figured, and he hated that he wanted to apologize for this. Like morphing his coffee order into something more interesting might mean that he had evolved into someone more interesting too. But this was always part of their flawed foundation: that she gravitated toward the storm, while he preferred locking the doors and shuttering the windows until the storm passed. Ezra studied her and again thought of Mimi: how he could have loved two women so wildly different. Mimi, like him, was ordered, measured, reliable, grown-up. They’d been, after all, a perfect match in their meet-and-greet questionnaire. Ezra eyed Frankie across the table and corrected himself: Frankie didn’t gravitate toward the storm, she was the storm. Who, he regretted having to remind himself, he may have married last night. Whether it was the coffee or the notion, Ezra’s intestines contracted.