It wasn’t even dinnertime, so it hadn’t occurred to him that they’d already be drinking. The bar was crowded when they got there. Laila sucked on a cigarette and waved to him from the dance floor, then threw her arms around him when he made his way through.

“Frankie?” he asked.

And her face cracked open with a Cheshire cat grin, like she was in on his mission, and she nudged her head to the back.

“Bathroom,” she said, then gave him a little push. “I heard about this all summer. So go and make it stick.”

And he felt something swell in him, a confirmation, an affirmation, and he pressed through the rest of the afternoon revelers and swung open the door to the ladies’ room, and there she was, the voice on the other end of the line. He couldn’t remember now if he kissed her or if she kissed him, but it didn’t matter either way. Time stood still, and something electric raced through him from his toes to his heart and clear up to the top of his skull until he pulled back to catch his breath, and she’d said with no small amount of surprise, “You found me.” And then he took off her clothes and explored her body right there in the Lemonhead bathroom, doing everything to her that he’d been imagining doing all summer. Not sex, because that, after so long, he wanted to make special, but there were so many other things to do besides sex.

Now, a decade later, with plenty of scars to show for it, Frankie moaned and said: “Look, I don’t want to alarm you, but I guess I need to tell you that I’m ninety-nine percent sure that I have a concussion. This happened once before in . . .” She stopped and searched for the word. “Oh right, this happened in Bangkok.” Then, as if remembering the whole shitstorm of a situation they were in, she added: “Did you reach Gregory? Does he know if you’re my legally wed husband?” She pushed past him and out the bathroom door, weaving her way toward a barstool.

In fact, this time Ezra had reached Gregory, who was no help at all. He picked up the hotel phone after three rings and mumbled, “Yeah?” And when Ezra asked him if they’d been together last night, Gregory said, “One second dude,” and seemed to rest the phone down on the nightstand. Ezra heard thumping footsteps and water running and some low-level groaning, and then Gregory returned and said, “Fucking booze-filled scavenger hunt, never again, never again,” and Ezra said: “So there really was a scavenger hunt?” and Gregory said, “Come on, dude, it’s too early for this bullshit,” and then hung up on him.

“So I think there . . . possibly . . . could have been a scavenger hunt?” Ezra said to Frankie now. “And that sounds . . . insane? Because I honestly have no recollection of it. At all.” He shook his head, trying to free a memory.