Her head throbbed with each syllable, so she quieted and waited for what she hoped was a suitable explanation. How could there be a suitable explanation? She had pledged never to speak to him again, never to think of him again, and now, here they were, skin to skin, tucked under his sheets as if they still knew each other in the ways that they used to.

She watched Ezra blanch and swallow. He scrunched his face, a habit from back in the time when they were crazy in love and he was tackling an Eastern European history paper or a group project he’d wind up doing the bulk of the work on. A decade ago, she found this perplexed look endearing. Now, its breezy intimacy made her ill. But that could have been the hangover too. How could he be so familiar to her, so exactly the same?

Of course, Ezra had grown up (she heard things, ok?)—law school, Manhattan, last she’d been told. But she hadn’t really kept up with him over the years. Had never once been tempted to seek out his phone number, had never whiled away late evening hours (even when tipsy) in an AOL search spiral. When she and Ezra split the day of their graduation, Frankie put it behind her entirely. She had barely given a second thought to Ezra Jones, except to occasionally consider how much she hated him, how deeply he had offended her, how gravely he had misunderstood her. That was the one that really stung. That after two years, he’d gotten her all wrong.

Of course, Laila and April occasionally couldn’t help themselves—April would mention that Connor had crashed with him for a boys’ weekend in New York; Laila would say that she heard he was single again, as if Frankie had known that he wasn’t single in the first place. There was one trip to New York about five years after graduation when the record company put Frankie up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, so Laila had come up from North Carolina and April had trained down from her graduate studies in Boston, and they were at the lobby bar, and Laila gasped and said, “Holy shit, is that Ezra?” And Frankie froze like a cornered animal, her adrenaline seizing her intestines, and then Laila said, “Oh, no, my bad, not him,” but Frankie was already shaking. Later, they were tipsy and flopped on the king bed, and Frankie said, “Guys, please, I don’t want to hear his name again, like, ever, ok?” And she saw a look pass between them, but they nodded all the same. That’s how Frankie did it, that’s how she organized her life, and that’s how she left Ezra Jones behind. By any means necessary.

Now, Ezra’s face unwound, and he hiccupped, his breath smelling like day-old alcohol. Then his features comported themselves again. He didn’t look much different than he had back in college, Frankie thought. His cheeks had shed the last of their baby fat, and his stubble was fuller now, as if he really could grow an actual beard, which had seemed just out of reach at twenty-one. But he was still boyish, his dark eyes still protected by full lashes, the line of freckles that ran from his left eye to his ear still prominent and shaped like the curve of a moon.