“Why would I lie to you?” he asked. “Why would I tell you I don’t remember last night if I did?” Besides, he wanted to add: the one thing he’d never been with her was untruthful.

“I don’t know. Maybe because you’re a lawyer. Isn’t getting married and breaking and entering the type of stuff you guys manipulate, like, daily?” Frankie winced and massaged the back of her head. “My head is killing me.” Her hand lingered. “I think . . . I think I have a bump here?”

Her eyes met his, and he waited for her to ask. Because after that dig, he wasn’t going to offer, and he wasn’t going to assume that she wanted his help.

“I mean, can you look?” she said finally.

“I’m not sure I’m in the best position to assess—”

She yanked his hand from his side of the table and jutted her head forward.

“Here,” she said, placing his palm on the back of her head. “Do you feel anything?”

It was odd, Ezra thought, to be touching her again. This woman whose body he once knew so intimately, whose body he had loved so intimately. Running his fingers through her hair was as personal an act as he knew.

His hand found the egg-like bump on the back right of her skull.

“Ow! Shit!” Frankie yelped. “I didn’t ask for a cranium massage!”

He pulled his fingers back and noticed a light film of what looked like blood.

“Is this . . . I can’t see well . . . but are you bleeding?”

Frankie went pale in front of him. He’d forgotten how bad she was with blood. They used to play “all’s fair football” on the quad with Gregory and Connor and Laila and Alec Barstow, and once April and Connor started dating, with April too. This mostly meant that when Frankie was on the opposite team, she’d climb on his back and try to pin him down while howling with laughter because she was hypercompetitive and tiny, and he was not, but sometimes he played along and fell to the ground just so he could kiss her while she giggled. During one outing when they admittedly all had a beer too many, Connor beaned Gregory square in the nose, which sent blood spurting, and they would later learn, after X-rays at student health, that he had broken it. And this was when Ezra learned that his hardened New York City girlfriend was extremely bad with blood: she literally fainted right there on the quad. Now, he wondered if she had changed as little as he had: still scared of her own insides, in more ways than one.

He tested the waters.

“Remember Gregory and that football?” he asked.

“Are you trying to make me pass out?”

So she did remember. Interesting, Ezra thought. How far she’d run away from this place without possibly running far at all.

“Is his nose still crooked?” she asked. “Remember how it looked off-center for the rest of senior year?”