Steinway Auditorium. There was something that was nicking a part of him from last night. But maybe he was just caught up in the memory of Frankie sitting at a piano bench from all those years ago, the first time he saw her play. He tucked his chin into the neck of his parka and braced against a blast of wind. No, he was headed to Waverly’s. Maybe his beloved Nokia had fallen under the poker table.

He would go to Waverly’s, and find his phone, and call Mimi and arrange a new flight, and take some Tylenol, and attend the wedding (ignoring Frankie the whole time), and propose at midnight when the world crossed over to a new century. Yes. He told himself yes as he turned around and headed in the opposite direction toward the north side of campus. That didn’t sound so hard. That felt extremely doable. What Ezra Jones always needed was a plan. What Frankie Harriman always needed was a foil. They never could have worked. They were always a thunderstorm of impending doom.

SEVENTEEN

Frankie

In the back alley behind the dorm where Ezra had brought her Paris, Frankie flexed her jaw and chewed on her lip and stewed for a good three minutes—about the fact that he left her, about the fact that she had the impulse to kiss him, about, well, all of it—before her ears got too cold and her fingertips went numb. Also, she needed the world to stop spinning. Eventually, when she was no longer dizzy, she started forming plan D. To the best of her calculation, she had about three hours before she had to make herself presentable and get to the chapel for photos, where she’d paste on a smile, just like she used to in her piano competitions, and pretend that everything was ok. Even all these years later, Frankie could endure any sort of version of pretend as long as she knew it was temporary.

It was better that she hadn’t told him—about the mistletoe, about looking cozy at Lemonhead, about a scavenger hunt in which . . . She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to remember how they had possibly ended up as partners. None of this meant—she hoped—that they’d somehow gotten so wasted that they indeed wed themselves to each other. Not just because Frankie didn’t believe in marriage, didn’t believe in a stupid piece of paper that made you promise the rest of your life to someone. In fact, Frankie could think of almost no one she knew who was happily married. Maybe April and Connor would give it a real go. Maybe monogamy wouldn’t bore them. Maybe exchanging emails with grocery lists was their type of kink. Maybe renting movies at Blockbuster and driving to Vermont for a week of maple syrup tasting for summer vacation was their idea of fun. She didn’t know. It wasn’t her life.