“Unnecessary attention?” Ezra barked. “You just threw a brick through a window!”

“Yeah, but that was in the back alley,” she replied. “No one notices that sort of thing for at least an hour.”

Ezra did not want to know how she knew this. In fact, it seemed perfectly normal that Frankie Harriman would know how to pull off a low-level heist. Nevertheless, he turned off the lights.

He stepped further inside and ran his hands over the paneled wood of the bar. He and Frankie had met here, a memory he hadn’t revisited in years. It came to him quickly: how it felt like luck that night, when she sat down next to him and he inexplicably spilled his guts about his girlfriend, Bethany, who started off as alluringly mysterious but soon left him emotionally itchy; that she was always coming and going, that he always felt like an afterthought. Still, Ezra was loyal and preferred monogamy even if it made him miserable. Part of this may have been, he could see now, that he so often walked on a knife’s edge because of his mother’s diagnosis; he simply didn’t know how to live differently. The anxiety, the occasional self-loathing were baked in, not because he’d been born anxious but because he was constantly worried about another phone call, about a worsening prognosis, about losing her. Still, though, he couldn’t blame his mother’s chemo schedule on his inability to cut himself loose of Bethany; he’d just never been great at extricating himself from situations that didn’t serve him. Years later, when he was offered six figures and an expense account and a fancy ergonomic chair at the white-shoe law firm where he’d worked for both summers in law school, he remembered that night with Frankie at the bar, how she’d plopped down next to him, a stranger, and he’d poured his miseries out to her, and she’d said in reply: “What are you even doing with her, with your life? Don’t you know that you’re in control of your own destiny?”

He and Frankie had done two rounds of shots that night, and then Gregory had joined them for two more, all of which surely made her advice and aura more legendary than they may have been in the sober light of morning. But once he recognized Frankie’s face, he started seeing her everywhere, and she seemed to soothe him, calm him in ways he felt palpably, almost like she was a drug. Prozac. Frankie was like his Prozac. He ran into her at the cafeteria a day later during lunch, and she greeted him with no artifice, as if they were long-lost friends. He found her poring over the card catalog at Burton Library later in the week, and she said, “Oh rad, it’s you. Go put your bag down with mine by the back stacks, then let’s go get bagels.” It was midafternoon, but Ezra adored eating breakfast foods at all hours of the day, and he soon discovered so did Frankie. It didn’t take long for them to be inseparable. And then, it took even less time for them to fall in love.