“You don’t understand,” he stammered. “This is the sort of thing Frankie does. This is the sort of mess she finds herself in. All the time.”

“So you have no blame for the mess?” Zoe asked, though it wasn’t really a question. She doubled back to the vending machines, then kicked one right in the lower left corner, and three seconds later, the machine spit out a bag of Fritos. She grabbed it and said, “Breakfast,” offering Ezra none.

Ezra considered this: blame. About his blame with Frankie. He thought, even a decade later, that he’d been a pretty wonderful boyfriend. He’d cheered her when she was sorrowful; he’d given her space when she needed to breathe. He’d brought her Paris, and he hadn’t asked too many questions about her life before Middleton because he’d promised her he wouldn’t, and he showed up day in, day out, when she was moody, when she was happy, when she was exhausted, when she wasn’t. He’d asked so little of her. This, to the best of his understanding, was what a dedicated boyfriend did. He simply stood beside her and wished for her happiness. Still, that hadn’t been enough.

He thought of Mimi now too. How even though he’d evolved since twenty-one—he liked to think he’d evolved—the way that he showed up for her as a present partner had not. Something about this bothered him, though he wasn’t in any sort of shape—battered and hungover—to articulate exactly what. Relationships were meant to be easy. His dad had left his mom (and him and Henry), and the explanation his mother always gave, with a sigh, was: “It just got too hard for him. He wasn’t the type of man to stay when it got hard.”

His dad would call on Christmas, and of course on their birthdays, but they would go months without seeing him, sometimes longer. He worked as a longshoreman on boats in Alaska and who knew where else. He’d literally fled to a northwestern territory rather than grit it out through the hard stuff. Ezra—and he knew this was a cliché, ok?—was going to inoculate himself from the hard stuff, and this way, he’d never have to test if he were the man his father was and then leave. So he’d tried to make Frankie’s life seamless in the way that he now tried to make Mimi’s life seamless, and thus, that meant that he had zero accountability in their destruction. This was one of the aspects about poker and even blackjack that he found so soothing, at least how he played it: it wasn’t that it was predictable, but there were rules and there were strategies, and if you kept your emotions out of it, you rarely got destroyed. Sure, maybe you’d fold, and maybe you’d lose an extra hundred, but if you were careful and held steady, nothing ever happened that you couldn’t foresee. If things really went sideways, you got up from the table and walked away unscarred but for whatever you lost in a hand. But with Frankie, so much was unforeseeable. Even ten years out of the explosive breakup in front of this very building, Ezra simply could not dream of the ways that he could have seen any of it coming. He’d kept his head down; he’d loved her. What else was there to know?