Ezra eyed Frankie for a long beat this morning, with Mimi inexplicably absent and a gold band even more inexplicably on his left ring finger. That night in San Francisco, they had finally trudged back to their hotel, and Mimi passed out, and Ezra watched her for a few minutes and eventually turned out the light on his side of the bed and slept fitfully. They woke up the next morning and apologized like grown-ups, and she took his credit card at his insistence because money didn’t matter to him now, even though he knew how awful that sounded, and she went shopping while Ezra met the Google guys and they told him all about how they were going to revolutionize the internet.

He stared again at Frankie today. He didn’t even know why he was thinking about all of that. “Hey,” he said, sliding onto the stool next to her at the bar. “I know there’s a lot of shit to sort through, but I really think we need to get you some medical attention. The rest of it can wait.”

She dropped her head between her arms and onto the bar and moaned. Finally, she raised her head and drew in her breath and said, “Ok.”

“Ok?”

“Ok!” she hissed, as if she couldn’t believe he were making her repeat it. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

Ezra honestly couldn’t believe it. A concession. He helped her off the stool, and she clutched his elbow, and he thought: Wow, this is kind of sweet, maybe I have her wrong, maybe she’s changed, maybe we really are in this together, and I’ve misread her this whole morning. And just as they were headed toward the broken window and the back door, the door swung open, and two security officers shouted: “You inside, don’t move! We have reports of a break-in!”

THIRTEEN

Frankie

Quite obviously, this was not Frankie’s first run-in with the authorities. There was that time in Dallas when Shawnee Patterson, lead singer of Night Vixen, trashed her suite at the Four Seasons and had to be forcibly removed by two beefy officers; there was another time in Nashville when Paxton Sunshine, a wildly talented yet emotionally unbalanced midlist country singer, made Frankie his first call after being arrested for a DUI. There had been situations at airports with intoxicated clients; there had been nightclub brawls and cocaine arrests and her own father’s dustups with the IRS every few years, for which he was always cleared although never quite exonerated. Frankie herself had managed to never yet be arrested personally, however. So this was new. Although technically, they were campus security, not cops, so she didn’t really feel the need to take them particularly seriously.

“The window was broken before we got here,” she said. “We thought maybe that meant it was open, like, the bar. It’s New Year’s Eve, you know? We wanted to start early. We’ve only been here a few minutes.” She glanced behind her. “Go check. Everything’s there. Nothing’s missing.”