Frankie pulled out a chair, drank her own coffee for a quiet beat and broke off half her bagel and swallowed it in a few quick bites, and then folded her hands in front of her, resting them on the table.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he replied. His stomach lurched, but he knew he needed to eat too, so he nibbled on the bagel, then found himself hungrier than he realized and kept going.

“It seems improbable that you don’t remember what happened . . .” Her voice drifted as she tried to drill down on what she really wanted to say, though Frankie often said one thing and meant something else entirely. “I mean, you were always the smart one.”

Ezra wondered if maybe she didn’t think she knew him like he still believed that he knew her. That wouldn’t shock him—he’d always been more sentimental. It wasn’t that he thought of her often. Sometimes, sure, but often? Not really. Sitting here, across from her in the cozy coffee shop, with Christmas carols lilting from the overhead speakers and with Middleton all around them, it was easy to imagine that he’d never forgotten her, hadn’t really stopped thinking of her at all.

Which was insane, he told himself. Insane! Frankie Harriman had driven him crazy, had split him in two, had withered him into a shell of himself, and once he departed Middleton, having packed up his (their) dorm room the day after graduation and driven to New York City with his mom, who was in remission again by then, he told himself that leaving her behind, leaving her anywhere, was the only possible solution. There was a quick phone call a week later, he remembered. A finality, the nail in the proverbial coffin. Closure, his mom said at the time, even though she’d liked Frankie, but then his mom had liked everyone. A decade ago, Ezra found it reassuring to tell himself that he was in control of his choices and his destiny, and so, on the winding drive down the Taconic Parkway, and in the days and weeks later, as he unpacked his boxes in his brother’s one-bedroom apartment (they built a temporary wall in the living room to create a small room for Ezra) a few blocks from NYU School of Law, he repeated this mantra: Frankie Harriman is out of your life. This is a very good thing.

Now, he sipped the coffee she had brought him and wished that he were in less pain, that his vision weren’t fuzzy, that his older brother, Henry, weren’t all the way in London or that Mimi or Gregory were here to tell him he was ok. He wasn’t ok, but just hearing them say it might make it more true all the same. What Ezra wanted was a support system. What Ezra had (mostly) was a brother in Great Britain, a wonderful but flaky friend in Gregory, and a girlfriend whom he wanted to marry but who would assuredly and messily ditch him when she discovered whatever it was that he couldn’t remember about last night.