“Wait, wait, I just saw me!” Frankie bounced on her toes, and the screen rewound. Indeed, there she was on screen, with Laila beside her. She wore her fuzzy fisherman’s sweater, her parka slung over her arm, and looked more pulled together than today, her hair brushed out and without the tight ache of pain ever present across her face right now.

Frankie leaned toward the TV and squinted.

“Ok, the time stamp says 5:47. I remember Laila saying it would give us an hour to catch up before the rehearsal dinner, which was at, what?” She turned toward Ezra. “Seven? Seven thirty?”

Ezra couldn’t help himself; he laughed. She widened her eyes and frowned.

“Is there something that’s hilarious about this? Being drugged, being married?”

“No one knows if we were drugged,” he answered. Frankie looked doubtful. “No, nothing’s hilarious about this at all. It’s only that—” He drifted, remembering how initially, when they were first heady in love, her loose relationship with time was adorable. Frankie was always late. To everything. Not because she intended to be rude or even meant to keep others waiting. Just because, he sensed, she’d been tethered so tightly to the rigors of her old life, that once she hit college, she found that she could be. Freedom came in many iterations, and for Frankie, no longer being micromanaged by parents manifested in all sorts of ways. Remarkably, he hadn’t even known she was a prodigy until a good nine months into their time together—and that was only by accident, when he stumbled upon her at Steinway Auditorium, and he watched breathless, like a Peeping Tom, from the back row. Even as they shared their secrets, Frankie had the freedom to keep parts of her concealed too.

“Seven thirty,” he said now. “The rehearsal dinner started at seven thirty.”

She didn’t reply. Just refocused on the TV and skimmed through the faces as they appeared in front of her. Ezra didn’t see what use he was, a second set of eyes when she knew what she was looking for, so he again thought of Mimi and went in search of a phone. He found a darkened office through a door to the left of the bar and poked his head in, as if he worried someone might pop out and startle him. He plunked down in the rolling chair in front of a worn and notched wooden desk, found the cordless under a pile of papers, and tucked the phone between his shoulder and neck and dialed. Five rings and then straight to voicemail, and he’d already left her a message when they were at the café.

Ezra rested the phone back in the cradle and ran his fingers over the computer mouse. In front of him, a desktop breathed to life. Password protected, of course, Ezra thought. He glanced over his shoulder—Frankie was still preoccupied. He didn’t need her to know that his skill set postcollege included various iterations of learning how to crack passwords. It’s not something he ever abused, but when he dipped his foot into the tech world, he made a point of learning everything that he could: both the rules and how to break them.