“Of course this would be disposable to you, like just another bridge you blew up then walked away from.”
“What isthatsupposed to mean?” Frankie said.
Ezra stared up at the gray sky rather than answer. Frankie knew what it meant; she didn’t even know why she asked. It was a shot across the bow, a shot about their ending.
“Fine,” she huffed. “What’s your advice then? You’re the lawyer here. Please, enlighten me.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” he said, his face a grimace.
“What do you mean, you’re not a lawyer?” Frankie was as surprised as she sounded.
“I’m not a lawyer, ok?”
“So whatareyou?” Surely, the Ezra Jones she knew had to besomething. “A DA? A US attorney?”
“Those are all just different names for a lawyer,” he said.
“Well, I am not the expert!” She flopped her hands to her sides.
“Look, I... I never took the bar exam. My mom got sick again that summer, so I went home. And then I missed the test, and they obviously couldn’t hire me—”
“But the Ezra I knew was obsessed with being a lawyer!”
“The Ezra you knew isn’t me anymore,” he said, leveling her with a look. And the sharpness in his voice indicated that was true: the Ezra she knew was compliant, avoidant, nonconfrontational. “Anyway, I probably could have retaken it but... I realized I didn’t want to. Weren’t you the one who always told me to think bigger, to take control of my own destiny?” He shrugged. “So I did.”
Frankie was gobsmacked, flabbergasted. Fifty percent of Ezra’s whole deal was that he always knew which direction he was pointed toward. He was unflappable against her chaos. He was the anchor to her sails.
“So what do you do? I mean, I assume you’re gainfully employed?”
“I work in tech.”
“Tech?” Frankie said, like she’d never heard of such a thing.
“A start-up.”
“A start-up?!” Frankie flailed her hand, the diamond ring stuck below her knuckle. She’d heard of start-ups, obviously. But they were for risk-seeking, fast-action types. Not Ezra, who had always been linear, always conservative, and she didn’t think he had it in him, if she were being honest. Frankie sighed. She wanted to ignore these revelations, because if she got into the meat of them, she’d be forced to consider that she hadunderestimated him, that who he was at twenty-two and who he was at thirty-two were different entities. And then everything from last night would get much more complicated.
“I built something—” He paused and dipped his head, as if he were embarrassed. “Well, I built an online platform for... card games.”
“Card games? Like... Uno?” Frankie remembered now that they had sometimes played strip Uno late at night when neither one of them wanted to study but each of them was too wired to sleep.
“No, like poker.” He stuttered. “Not like poker. Poker. I built a gaming model, and I sold it to Yahoo.”
“Wow. That’s actually... amazing,” Frankie said, surprising herself that she meant it. “You always were the smartest guy in the room.”
“It’s complicated.”
“What’s complicated about being paid for something you’re good at?”
Ezra sighed. “Mimi... Mimi isn’t a fan of gambling.”
“Mimi isn’t a fan of... Why would you even begin a sentence like that, like she’s your mom?” Frankie realized how terrible that sounded as soon as it was out of her mouth. Blood rushed to her cheeks and then to her head wound. She flattened her palm on the top of her head to try to slow the throbbing.
“You don’t even know her,” Ezra said tensely. “You don’t know the first thing about her.”
“And to think I’ve lived my whole life without that and have gotten by totally fine.” Frankie looked around. “But she’s not here, so why is that even relevant?”
“It’s relevant because when you’re in a relationship, you try to meet the other person’s needs!” Ezra threw his arms up as if his point were so obvious that he couldn’t believe he had to state it.
