“Don’t look at me as if you have the right to my secrets anymore,” she said finally. “I don’t owe that to you.” She fumbled for her jacket zipper and tugged it up an inch, as if this were any sort of protection from his permeating stare.

Ezra blew out his breath, the whirl of air pillowing around him.

“Listen,” Frankie continued. “I’ve set foot in Steinway Auditorium exactly twice in my entire life. And just because one of them was with you doesn’t mean that I relived those days last night.”

“Both of them were with me, by the way,” he countered. “So who’s to say that last night—”

“Jesus Christ!” Frankie yelped into the empty campus, the barren trees. “Are we relitigating our senior year or are we trying to find out if we are married?!”

“Fine, just fine. Perfect,” he said, and started walking again, not waiting for her to catch him.

Frankie slunk along beside him until they reached the corner just across from a strip of dilapidated storefronts. The Soup Café, a Chinese restaurant, a campus clothing shop, a rinky-dink drugstore, and Lemonhead. The lights on the marquis were illuminated, but the L had burned out, so it read EMONHEAD, which struck Frankie as more depressing than it probably was.

Both of them stopped and stared across the street. It felt like a resurrection of sorts, of her old life, of their lives. Frankie felt an unwelcome swell of emotions—nostalgia, comfort, pain—rise through her: she didn’t even know for what, specifically, but she thought that maybe it was just for lost time. How can you unexpectedly split from your boyfriend after a no-holds-barred fight in front of Burton Library and then wake up in a bed with him ten years later and grieve for those years, even if you wouldn’t do any of it differently? Frankie hadn’t allowed herself to mourn all that she lost after graduation. It was easier to move on, to force her way through. Now, she wondered if never mourning at all had been its own form of sorrow. It’s not like pain just evaporated, she considered. It needed to go somewhere, and maybe shards of it were still lying dormant inside of her, waiting for a resurrection.

There was a Toyota Corolla in the tiny parking lot, and an open dumpster filled to the brim with black garbage bags, which gave Frankie hope that at least a janitor might be working at the bar this morning. But it was New Year’s Eve, and she knew that would just be dumb luck. Of the many things that Frankie Harriman believed in, dumb luck wasn’t one of them.

“Ready?” Ezra asked.

No, she wanted to say.

But in reply, she stepped ahead of him. She wasn’t going to let Ezra Jones see her wilt. She never had. She wouldn’t now.

TEN

Ezra

ELEVEN A.M.