“Ma’am, please empty your pockets,” the older guard, who looked like he was fighting middle-age weight gain and badly needed a good night’s sleep, said. “We need to know if anything is missing.”

“I already told you—” she started, then looked to Ezra. He was the lawyer. She’d covered for the pepper spray; maybe it was time he handled the legalese.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” She nudged her chin in his direction. “Shouldn’t this now be your territory? Like, our Miranda rights or whatever?”

Frankie didn’t technically even know when Miranda rights were called for, but she’d watched enough episodes of Law & Order in hotel rooms to know that it sounded official. She had to be in the shower by no later than 3:30 p.m. to make the photos at the chapel, and getting hauled into campus jail (was there such a thing as campus jail?) was not part of her timeline, not part of her plan. It was true, she considered, that she actually didn’t have much of a plan after Lemonhead, as she had somehow convinced herself that the VCR would hold all the answers. It quite obviously did not. Indeed, just the contrary: it only added to the mounting list of questions. They could go to the athletic complex, they should go to the athletic complex, but that would mean coming clean to Ezra about the slivers of the night that she remembered—the mistletoe, the kiss under the mistletoe, snippets of the scavenger hunt—and at the moment, that was obviously out of the question. She didn’t trust him to stay calm. She didn’t trust him at all.

“Miranda rights are for when police actually arrest you,” Ezra said.

“You went to NYU Law for that?” Frankie replied.

“I went to NYU Law for—” Ezra stopped himself and emitted a long, tense sigh, and Frankie saw his jaw flex, which he always used to do when he was trying not to argue with her. In fact, they were so aligned that for just about the whole of their relationship, they honestly never did. She wanted what he wanted; he wanted what she wanted. Frankie couldn’t believe that a partnership could be so harmonious; Ezra couldn’t believe that she was always waiting for something to blow up. Maybe that was half of their problem, Frankie thought now, as she stared at Ezra and campus security stared at them both. That if you never fight, you never learn how to fight fair, how to fight well. Instead, there’s just a void, and inevitably, eventually, that becomes combustible. Just like it did for them.

“Your pockets,” the younger guard said.

“Do you think we, like, smuggled out Crystal Gayle’s headshot? Rolled it up and stuffed it down our pants or something?” Frankie asked. Crystal Gayle was the only one she could think of in the heat of the moment. She knew there were better, snappier names back there. Carly Simon maybe? James Taylor? “There is literally nothing of value inside. Absolut vodka? What is that? Like, fifteen bucks?”