“The dorms use key cards now,” he said. “Everything’s gone tech.”

Frankie sighed. In college, she was constantly losing her keys to the main gate of their building. She didn’t know why. Theoretically, she was disciplined and organized after years of childhood commitment to learning her craft. In practice, she was half falling apart. There was a pay phone on the corner just down the block from the upperclassman dorms, so not infrequently, she would call Ezra collect, then hang up once he intentionally refused the charges, and he would lumber down the steps from his third-floor room to the gate. He never seemed to mind and always greeted her with a raised eyebrow but a happy smile, like he was the only one who could grant her entry. And in a lot of ways, he was right.

Ezra was staring now, a leveled, steely glare. “Why did you come back, anyway?”

A simple question.

“Because April asked me to be a bridesmaid,” Frankie said.

“No.” Ezra shook his head. “That’s not a reason.”

Frankie opened her mouth as if to protest, then closed it. She didn’t want to tell Ezra that of course her instinct had been to say no. That when April reached her in Vancouver to tell her that Connor had proposed and to ask if she would be in the wedding, Frankie thought of all of the excuses she could offer. April was always so kind, and honestly, she wouldn’t have argued, wouldn’t have even doubted if Frankie were being truthful. But then Frankie remembered their freshman year together: even if they now lived such different lives that they often ran out of things to talk about whenever they did talk, April had that unique quality of making friendships easy, of being an ideally perfect freshman year roommate who wasn’t put off by Frankie’s moodiness, who made sure she always invited her to join her at the dining hall so Frankie had someone to sit with, who showed Frankie—who’d had a housekeeper her whole life—how to do the laundry so her whites didn’t turn pink, so her sweaters didn’t get tossed in the dryer and emerge infant-sized.

There were people who saved you in big and small ways.

Frankie was old enough now to know this, and April had saved her in so many small ways over that first year, when Frankie was still uncomfortable in her skin, still awkward with her identity, that she couldn’t bring herself to be cruel and say no to the bridesmaid request. Also, there was the kindness the day of graduation too—the no-questions-asked call to the taxi, the hug before the drive to the airport.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that she didn’t regret saying yes to the bridesmaid request: she did. But then she dialed Laila, who was asleep in her apartment in Charlotte and who said: “You think I want to wear a magenta taffeta gown? Sometimes we do things that we just don’t want to do for the people we love.” They hung up, and Frankie sat in the silence of her hotel room, like so many hotel rooms she’d sat in for the past few years, and wondered why she so often found herself alone. And maybe if she showed up for the people she really did love, she’d find herself less alone when it mattered. She wasn’t about to say any of this to Ezra though.