Frankie reached up and palmed the lump on her head, as if that could circumvent the blood flow. She thought of the time in Bangkok when she had gotten a concussion after she’d beaned her head against load-in equipment. There, she’d lain flat on a couch in the greenroom until her balance recalibrated, and after a few hours, her disorientation and spotty memory issues cleared up. She assumed the same would happen today. Besides, she didn’t want Ezra’s sympathies. He’d already suggested student health, and the last thing she wanted was to be stuck in an exam room with Ezra looking worried and making calming but annoying comments to whatever resident was on call from the Pittsfield hospital.

Then, from behind the pastry display, Frankie heard: “Excuse me, oh my God.”

She turned, and Ezra’s gaze followed. The barista swung open the little door from behind the counter and stepped forward.

“I just realized,” she said. “I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t recognize you from . . . well . . . your face. Are you ok?”

“Semi,” Ezra said, as his eyes watered and tears streaked down his cheeks. “Not great, I guess.”

“I didn’t make the connection at first,” she said. “But it’s you from last night.”

Frankie perked up, her headache momentarily forgotten. Ezra, best that he could, perked up too.

“You saw me last night?”

The barista—Frankie noticed now that she wore a name tag that read Joni—frowned.

“Well, yeah? Five card draw?”

“Is that some sort of drinking game?” Frankie interjected, because a drinking game would at least explain the situation. She hoped not though. What she hadn’t told Ezra because, well, there hadn’t been a great time to raise it, and besides, her booze habit was none of his business, is that she’d sworn off alcohol for two months now. She’d made the decision right before Halloween. She hadn’t checked herself in anywhere; she wasn’t attending AA. She didn’t, like, have a formal problem. But she found that at thirty-two, her hangovers were sticking like ugly bruises, and it was true that she could no longer party with Night Vixen, who was now a multimillion-dollar brand, the way she did early in her career. Someone needed to be the goddamned adult, someone needed, dare she say it, to be the Girl Scout! Frankie didn’t want it to be her, but alas, who else was it going to be?

“No, not a drinking game,” Joni replied to Frankie. “Poker.”

“Poker?” Ezra yelped. “I was playing poker?”

Frankie rested her elbows on the table, silently relieved that she hadn’t been driven to drink by Ezra Jones, and folded her hands beneath her face and parked her chin there. Now this was getting interesting. She remembered that Ezra, at least the last she had heard, had been banned from the Bellagio and the MGM when he was caught counting cards a year or two after college. She couldn’t remember the specifics (and hadn’t totally believed them, if she was being honest), only that Laila had been dating a mutual friend who spilled the details, and Laila, even though she was fully aware of Frankie’s moratorium on Ezra Jones news, called her up breathless to gossip all about it. The whole thing was lurid, shocking—Frankie kept saying, “No way, no way, that can’t be right,” but indeed, it evidently was. A decade ago, Ezra had never had any sort of edge to him: he was a baseball hat–wearing, khaki pants, Boy Scout kind of guy. In fact, Frankie remembered now, he had been an actual Boy Scout until his freshman year in high school when Henry, older and significantly cooler, pulled him aside at Christmas and said: Dude, you gotta quit, ok? No one will ever make out with you if you don’t. You couldn’t judge a book by its cover, but with Ezra, you kind of could. He was nice, he was smart, he was all-American handsome in the way that suburban Philly boys could be in 1987, and he was the sort of committed that most girls wanted. He was Bruce Springsteen, not Axl Rose.