Fine. She blew out her breath. Fine! She would solve this herself, just as he’d suggested. Frankie was always a better solo operator than team player anyway, if she were being honest. School orchestra was the worst because she wanted only to do her own thing, and obviously, sports were out because, well, she was a fairly low-tone, highly protected bubble kid who spent her weekends at music competitions. She couldn’t risk any injuries to her fingers or her hands or really her arms or elbows, so anything remotely fun was out. Also, she was an only child and, therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, had never been a fan of collaboration. You would think this would be critical for a music manager, but in fact, what worked for her and her clients was simply that Frankie knew best, and they all understood this and so they listened. When they didn’t listen, well, that’s when the trouble started, and Frankie would be called in to clean it up. For someone who appeared remarkably undisciplined, Frankie was actually quite rigid. You don’t practice piano for four hours a day throughout your childhood and transform into a different person as an adult. If she could have, she would have—she gave it her best go at Middleton, for God’s sake. She’d triple-pierced her ear, worn acid-washed jeans with rubber bracelets and fringy tank tops, watched hours of MTV rather than rewrite her term papers, but none of that changed anything about her DNA, about the bones of who she was inherently. So now here she was, fully formed. Quite volatile, which could be misconstrued as wildly spontaneous, but those were not the same things. Not even close to being the same things.

So plan D it was.

Frankie emerged from the alley behind their old dorm where Ezra had once brought Paris to her. There was no sign of him when she looked to either side, though she could see the tracks from his Sambas—the little circles from the soles still clearly defined—heading back toward the north part of campus. She was certain he was going to try Waverly’s, so she assessed she should go anywhere but.

A heavy gust of wind caught her off guard, whipping the snow against her cheeks, seizing her hood and sending it aloft, nearly propelling her backward and onto the ground. The world tilted for a good five seconds, and Frankie held her hands in front of her as if she were going to topple again. Her legs felt wobbly, her energy totally zapped.

She made her way to a bench along the walkway just a few buildings down from Steinway Auditorium, then tucked her hand inside the arm of her parka sleeve and dusted the snow from the seat. She’d been so annoyed with Ezra back there that she hadn’t even had a moment to consider that he wasn’t the buttoned-up lawyer he’d always promised to be.

“Why law?” Frankie would say every few weeks while he was studying for the LSAT, and then later, while he was doing his applications, mostly because she didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life, but also because she didn’t understand what made it so appealing. Every lawyer she knew, mostly men through her father, was dull and waxy.