“The music teacher?” Ezra pressed once.

Frankie went silent for so long that Ezra wondered if they’d been disconnected. Then finally, she said: “No, not Fred.” Then, “Just so you know, I’m the one who made the choice to stop playing.” Ezra didn’t know and, further, didn’t understand why that specific fact mattered.

But on Frankie’s birthday, he knew how he could at least make her smile. He borrowed a ladder from the janitor’s closet in their dorm, and Connor and Gregory held the legs while he strung fairy lights back and forth in the alley behind her second-floor room. He used some of his summer earnings to pay an art student for sketches of both the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, which he hung on the brick wall that was ten feet from her window. He ran to the grocery store and bought baguettes and Brie and red grapes. He splurged on a wine he didn’t understand and couldn’t afford.

Frankie had a late-afternoon lecture—he remembered now that it was Econ 101, which she hated but took because she was preparing for postcollege life and thought maybe she wanted to be music adjacent: a producer, an agent; she didn’t know but it seemed like econ might come in handy. As long as she wasn’t an artist, she’d say. I’ll be anything but the talent. They’d talk about this late at night in bed together, and he always assumed he was part of those plans. He’d never questioned it; she’d never given him reason to. So for her birthday and while she was at Econ 101, he snuck into her room and donned a beret and turned out the lights so when dusk settled in, the alley glowed behind him. She swung open the door, and her weary face morphed into a delighted one, and he swept her into his arms and said, “Happy birthday, mademoiselle” (the most French he knew—he had studied Latin), and uncharacteristically, Frankie burst into tears. And Frankie never cried.

“Happy tears,” she said. And Ezra believed her.

And from then on, at least until early spring, six or so months later, the two of them were better, they were fixed. Ezra had fixed them. Ezra, he’d liked to think, had fixed her. It only took Paris. And the alley that they’d find themselves in again eleven years later.

FIFTEEN

Frankie

Frankie knew that Ezra was thinking about that birthday, the one where he’d brought Paris to her, but she didn’t want to get into all of that. It was easier to keep this clean: the past was what it was; the present was also what it was. Ezra had always been a hopeless romantic. She had enough road between the two of them now to understand that this was at least part of why they were incompatible.

He was staring at her now, and she didn’t want to squirm, but it was admittedly difficult not to.

“So were you going to propose to her here? Like, in Paris?” she blurted out.