“The rules,” Ezra would say, every time, as if Frankie thought he might have come up with a different reason. “There’s always a firm set of rules. And you either follow them or there’s a consequence. That makes sense to me.”

Frankie still loved him enough not to point out that the law was open to all sorts of interpretation and not exactly equitable to all. Also, she loved him too much to note that his need for things to be black and white, to be so clear-cut and controlled, was about much more than the law and mostly about the uncertainty and destabilization of having a mother who was in and out of chemo. And there was nothing Ezra could do to change that. So Frankie would just sit on his bed with him while he typed into his gray PC with the interminable hum of his dot matrix printer in the background, and offer encouraging edits to his essays, and then, when she got really bored with it all, she’d take off her shirt and lay there topless, counting the seconds in her head until he noticed. The highest she ever got to was eighty-seven, and that was only because Ezra was extremely focused that night.

When Ezra was accepted to NYU in February of their senior year, he assumed she would move to New York with him. Frankie didn’t know what she was doing with her postcollege life, but she was certain she didn’t want to repeat her past and move to the same city with the same streets and the same haunts and the same people she’d already experienced. She didn’t want to stomp out his joy though, so she held her breath and hoped he got in elsewhere. She would have considered moving anywhere else with him. She really would have.

Thus, after all that steady certainty, after how much he loved the law and after he chose NYU because they gave him a full scholarship and a research job that paid well enough for him to start saving (she understood why he couldn’t turn it down, and she didn’t ask him to) and was also close to his mother who he still worried about, Frankie was genuinely shocked that he was some big-time tech guy now. She’d met plenty of these new “internet” dudes at swanky LA parties, and Ezra, at least her Ezra, didn’t strike her as that type at all: flashy cars with subwoofers, girlfriends with enormous fake breasts, expense accounts to cover a multitude of sins. They talked about stock options and second homes and remote Caribbean islands that they jetted to for the weekend.

She shook her head and corrected herself. Her Ezra was not a thing. It was odd though, she had to admit. How the span of a decade had opened between them, and as much as they no longer knew each other, to Frankie—and she wondered if it were the same for Ezra—she couldn’t shake the notion that she still knew him as intimately as ever.