“Walk?” Frankie said, too loud. “To where? Am I keeping you here—”

“Actually, you still have my grandmother’s ring—” Ezra’s voice rose several decibels. “I don’t exactly trust you with a family heirloom.”

“Fine! Don’t let me hold you up!” She tried to yank it off her finger again. The ring still didn’t budge.

A window opened a few stories up and a head popped out.

“Can you guys please shut the fuck up? Some of us are trying to sleep!” The window slammed shut.

Ezra peered skyward and connected the dots. They were behind the upperclassman dorms; he knew it looked familiar. He’d only been back here once before, and the snowfall today made it look more romantic than it had been back then, with its three dumpsters and faded brick facade in need of a pressure wash. It was the fall of their senior year, and they were still happy. Mostly, anyway. Frankie had spent the summer with her mom in the Hamptons. By now, her parents had split for good—Frankie had known it was coming after a phone call in late spring—and her mom got the house in Sagaponack. Ezra shared a dorm room with Gregory at Fordham where they both took summer classes at night and worked at low-paying internships during the day. He took the Jitney out to see Frankie in early July for the long holiday weekend, his only visit that summer. Not because he didn’t want to be with her all day, every day; rather because that one weekend visit had gone so poorly. It was clear upon his arrival that she was fighting with her mom. She didn’t want to elaborate about the details, and every time Ezra asked, she snapped things like, “Ezra, you can’t fix this, so please stop,” or “This goes way back, ok? Like ages back. You don’t seem to get it.” He suspected it had to do with her music, but he’d promised never to ask her about it again, since their fight a few months earlier in Steinway when he’d first seen her playing, just after her parents had told her about their separation. And a promise to Ezra was a promise, even if he committed to it before he understood how breaking it may have saved them.

He wasn’t emotionally mature enough that weekend in the Hamptons to suggest to her that her problems were his problems and that he would have just been fine hearing her out, listening to her vent. Because he did want to fix it; he did want to fix her. So they spent the weekend in a tense, noiseless bubble, with her mother pretending everything was perfectly fine whenever he was in the room, and with the two of them whispering out their rage when he wasn’t. He was blessedly relieved when he finally kissed her goodbye and stepped on the Jitney to return to the city.