Ezra groaned as Frankie counted slowly and aloud. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five. And now exhale: five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

The three of them breathed in and out in sync, as if they weren’t a band of misfits who were trying to find their way out of a crisis that none of them understood. Then Ezra felt Frankie’s palms on his back, and he was sitting upright, the blood draining quickly from his brain, the floor tilting ever so slightly until his mind settled.

“I think your swelling’s going down a little,” Joni offered. “I mean, your eyes.”

Frankie stood and extended her hands toward him for the second time this morning, much as she had so many years back. “Come on, I’ll help you up.”

Ezra winced and declined. Instead, he sort of rolled forward and over and onto all fours, then grasped a nearby chair.

“So,” Frankie said. “Do you remember a scavenger hunt, like Joni said?”

Ezra did not.

“Of course not.” Frankie sighed. “Look, I have a hideous taffeta dress waiting for me at the hotel, so I sort of need to speed things along. We need to start at Lemonhead.”

“I was never at Lemonhead.”

“You have no clue where you were.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Joni asked. “That’s how they do it in the movies.”

Ezra dug in. He remembered checking into the hotel. He remembered trying Mimi’s cell, but reception was spotty in both Western Mass and her Missouri suburb, so he logged on to his laptop and paid for the hotel dial-up to send her an email. She planned to fly to Chicago that evening, then was on the first flight out to Hartford, and a car would take her from there. He intended to send her the itinerary one more time because Ezra was the type of boyfriend who did that sort of thing.

He remembered right as he was about to send the email, Gregory knocked on his door and showed up with some home-brewed vodka that, when Ezra thought about it now, was probably the beginning of his problems. How he wobbled down the hallway to the elevator. How, after he saw Frankie with her yellow headphones and her Doc Martens, all his trouble began.

Now, on the floor of the café, he realized that he had no memory of what came next. Maybe he was at Lemonhead with Frankie and Laila. Maybe they were fucking married. Maybe he’d stolen someone’s car with those keys. They could have done anything. They could have robbed a bank; they could have torched the library. He didn’t know.

He reached for the leg of a chair and hoisted himself up. He needed to get his wits together, get his brain involved. Ezra had always been a whiz kid, a bit of a logical genius, which was why everyone had pushed him toward law and why he’d gotten a full ride at Middleton. He could, at least on paper, outsmart anyone. There’s no reason why he couldn’t methodically piece together their night. If he had to do it with Frankie, so be it. It would probably be easier to do without her, mostly because she knew exactly which buttons to push to send him skyrocketing to the penthouse of frustration, but still, he could do it if it meant proposing to Mimi at midnight and putting Frankie behind him once and for all.