Today, she watched Ezra behind the espresso bar counter, the phone pressed to his ear, his eyes floating toward the ceiling, and she saw him mutter under his breath. Then he handed the phone back to Joni and returned to the table, swinging his coat over his shoulders and around his torso in one fluid motion. Somehow, Frankie had adjusted to his mangled face. It was odd, she thought, how something so shocking not even an hour ago felt digestible now. His cheeks still looked like roadkill, but now this was just an accepted fact of their morning.

Her own head was still throbbing, but she didn’t want to make a big deal of it. She knew Ezra would become paternal with her too, and the last thing Frankie wanted was a father figure. Her parents had been trust fund kids who got pregnant too young and decided to valiantly keep it—keep her—but neither of them had been ready to be the type of parents who raised a well-rounded kid. So however Frankie turned out, she figured it wasn’t her fault. They’d been twenty years old and had too much money and not enough interest or life experience. And like Ezra’s face, it seemed completely fucked-up for a period in her childhood, but years later, it was what it was. For a while there, the three of them had united behind her musical genius: they had something to focus on collectively rather than recognize that they were simultaneously wholly dysfunctional. When she abandoned her music, they abandoned one another. She used to blame herself, but that got tiring quickly, so she settled into a new mantra: Who ever said family had to be forever?

She was a city kid seeking an escape when she’d arrived at Middleton at eighteen. Her parents and her school counselors at LaGuardia (everyone knew it as the Fame school by then) and her music teacher, Fred, were pushing her toward a conservatory, toward Juilliard. Middleton, a smaller liberal arts school in the middle of the Berkshires, had only a budding music department. So she said yes as soon as the oversize envelope arrived in the mail.

She’d shown up for college admittedly unformed. She’d spent the bulk of high school in music labs, collaborating with teachers or semiprofessionals or performing in competitions where sometimes, afterward, the kids would sneak away from their parents and try to act like normals, but they, all of them, were one-degree abnormal, which her mom always told her was necessary for great talent, for prodigies. But mostly that meant that her high school social experience, at least until her senior year, was spent in deserted classrooms post-concert sipping off-brand soda and eating powdered donuts left over from the reception. By seventeen, however, she was done with all of that. But still, it was no surprise that she landed at Middleton a bit of a mess.

“Well,” Ezra said today, heaving his shoulders like he bore the weight of the world on them. “It’s true: her flight got canceled. I guess she called my machine last night too. So”—he flapped his arms in the air—“that’s that.”