“You can do whatever you want with your body,” the girl said. “But just not in my bed.” She grimaced and gave Frankie a long look from head to toe. Then she reached into her pocket and said, “I’m calling the cops again. You can’t just, like, get away with this. Someone has to be held accountable.”

EIGHTEEN

Ezra

ONE P.M.

Ezra knew before he got there that Waverly’s would be closed. But he wasn’t someone who left things to chance and wanted to be sure. Then there it was. Shuttered and dark. He wasn’t about to be as reckless as Frankie and vandalize a window to solve his problem. He pressed his forehead against the glass and tried to peer in, hoping to, he didn’t know, jog a memory or stumble upon a clue. But the windows were tinted, and the glare from the gray skies meant that he was only staring back at his own reflection. His face looked a bit better now, cooled from the snowball and given some time. Ezra had quite obviously never been pepper-sprayed before—he was the opposite of the type of guy who would have been pepper-sprayed before—so he wasn’t certain how long it would take to normalize. (How had it been only four hours since he’d woken up with Frankie? This day felt like a lifetime.) He did the mental math though and thought that surely, by the time he figured out how to get Mimi to Middleton, all would be well; his face would be the face of the man she loved.

Obviously, there was still the mess of last night to sort out before her arrival. Ezra was not in the habit of keeping secrets. If anything, he opened himself up quickly. Too quickly. Gregory used to rib him that he fell in love with anyone who loved him back. This had been true his whole life through, so he couldn’t even blame his mother’s diagnosis, which would be the easy thing to point to. Fear of abandonment and all of that. But this was simply how he was wired. He wanted a partner; he liked the notion of companionship. He pulled back from the window of Waverly’s and stared at himself and was honestly astonished that he ever thought he’d get that from Frankie Harriman.

He turned and headed back toward campus. It was almost 1 p.m. by now. Surely, Gregory would be awake. Surely, someone must know if he’d gotten married last night. But at least we didn’t sleep together, he told himself as he crossed back onto Middie Walk. At least I don’t have to tell Mimi about that. Sleeping in a bed with Frankie was not the same thing as sleeping with Frankie. He’d gotten in over his head with that Portland booze (he really needed to speak with Gregory), which, he realized now, he certainly should not have combined with his emergency Xanax, and had been swept up in a wave of nostalgia and broken into Homer. But that was it. That was it! That was not a reason not to get engaged to the woman he loved. He knew, granularly, like he knew when he had a winning hand, that this was all horseshit: that Mimi was not the type of woman who excused falling asleep in the same bed with an ex-girlfriend as an oops. He couldn’t expect her to be, wouldn’t have wanted her to be. They’d said as much on their questionnaires: that when faced with infidelity, they’d each have a no-tolerance policy. But Ezra had to cling to something. He was a relentless optimist right up until the cancer spread to the bones.