She reached into her crossbody bag and pulled out Frankie’s CD Walkman. Frankie had forgotten about it in the mess of everything else. The Walkman itself wasn’t important. The Night Vixen rough cut CD was. A leak could get her fired. Night Vixen would never dream of letting her go, but everyone answered to someone, and Frankie still had a boss at the management company, even if she pretended that she alone played God.

“Oh, wow!” Frankie said, trying to keep her cool. “Yes, thank you, I lost that last night.”

She took a step closer to retrieve it, and the girl inched her arm away.

“What do I have to give you to take it off you?” Frankie asked.

“The dignity of not having screwed in my bed last night?”

Frankie sighed, low, long, exhausted. “I really don’t think—” She stopped herself. She was already pressed for time and arguing with a freshman about her sex life was doing no one any good. Still, she was begrudgingly impressed that this girl was holding her own, that she hadn’t already bent to Frankie’s plan. Few things wowed Frankie Harriman more than independent thinking. In the end, that might have been the reason she and Ezra never would have worked. He wanted what she wanted; he was fine with what she was fine with. At least initially.

They had had their first fight just before the end of their junior year, after they’d been together for a full nine months. Who goes nine months in a relationship without ever expressing a dissatisfaction, without ever diverging on opinions? She could see how, in hindsight, the tipping point that led to that fight—that she hadn’t told Ezra she was a prodigy, that she’d spent most of her childhood awing grown-ups in concert halls, and that he only learned of it by stumbling upon her playing at Steinway—may have felt like its own sort of betrayal. But Frankie had gotten so used to her college persona, the free spirit who was responsible to no one, that she hadn’t wanted to let her old persona show; she hadn’t wanted to do anything other than pretend she’d buried it at seventeen.

Frankie hadn’t known she had an audience that day in April of her junior year. She’d just gotten off the phone with her mother, who had announced that she and Frankie’s dad were splitting, and though Frankie had always assumed that this news, this official split, would come as a relief, she instead was consumed with grief. She couldn’t explain it: she knew her parents didn’t love each other; she knew that her talent and potential was what glued their trio together. But there it was all the same: anguish, and when the grief rolled over her, she surprised herself and raced through the rolling hills of campus to Steinway. Someone at the dorm must have told Ezra she’d left in a fit or that they saw her fly into Steinway, but he didn’t hear it from her. This was Frankie’s thing, her private thing, and as much as she loved him, she still wanted some things just for herself. She didn’t think this made her selfish.