He shook his head and said, simply: “Mimi, I think... maybe we were a perfect match on paper but—”
She interrupted him. “Ezra, you knew that wasn’t real, right?”
“What?”
“The questionnaire, you knew that wasn’t real?”
Ezra narrowed his eyes into a squint. “What?”
“None of that is real!” she said, as if she were explaining that the world wasn’t flat, as if this should have been the most fundamentally obvious thing to him for the past two years they’d been together. “The questions are bullshit, the matchmaking is bullshit. It’s all just for an algorithm. We just want people to sign up and maybe some of them will have a few decent dates and get laid. Who am I to say who will be a perfect match, who will live happily ever after? It’s all fiction. We just wanted their credit cards, their monthly payments. If anything else worked out, that’s the fucking cherry on top!”
“But you trotted me out; you told everyone that we were the perfect example.” Ezra felt his cheeks flush with heat, embarrassed at his naivete, as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “I hated all of that. And you did it anyway.”
“You never told me you hated it!” Mimi scowled. “And you never even looked closely at my form. You never actually saw my answers! You just believed what you wanted to, and I guess I figured that you were smart enough to know that.” She crossed her arms, pursed her lips, then quieted. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make this work. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t actuallywonderful. We are!” Her eyes swam with tears. Then quieter still, a plea: “Please.Even if it started on a lie, I love you, I really do.”
“I can’t,” he said without artifice, his thoughts swarming and swirling then settling. “I just... I can’t.”
And she let out a string of ugly, monstrous wails, and Ezra didn’t judge her for it. He only wished he’d seen that part of her sooner, back when he would have found the ugly parts beautiful. Now, he knew, he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t changed. So there was nothing else to see.
THIRTY-FIVE
Frankie
Frankie watched April and Connor slice into their red velvet cake and delicately feed each other a bite, which was a promising sign. She’d read somewhere that couples who shove the cake into each other’s faces have a higher chance of divorce. Honestly, Frankie thought that everyone had a pretty decent chance at divorce, but she was relieved, almost overjoyed, that her friends from so long ago had a shot at making it work.
The DJ invited everyone back onto the dance floor, and April let out a whoop, and Connor, bless his heart, tried to do a little pump with his arms timed to a gyration of his hips, and April laughed until she cried good tears. But the DJ changed it up at the last second—a trap to get reticent couples up from their chairs, a bait and switch for potential twosomes who were left flat-footed, expecting a jam, and being thrown a love song.
The opening intro to the song was unmistakable, and Frankie felt her stomach fall out. She could see the notes in hermind as clearly as she could see April and Connor in front of her. Bono’s unmistakable voice cut through the auditorium, and in no time at all, she was back in the bathroom of Lemonhead, and Ezra was bursting through the door because he had been looking for her everywhere.
See the stone set in your eyes
Frankie stared out into the darkened auditorium where Ezra had fled maybe an hour or so ago. She’d lost track of time since. She closed her eyes and listened to the music and the low electric buzz of her friends on the stage where she’d avoided so much for so long.
I can’t live, with or without you.
And then Frankie Harriman remembered everything.
THIRTY-SIX
Ezra
ELEVEN P.M.
Bruno called the campus shuttle, which was still operating on New Year’s Eve, and Ezra gave Mimi the room keys. He’d find somewhere else to sleep for the night, he told her. He said to book whatever flight she wanted back home or whichever train she needed if she wanted to go to their apartment in New York instead. He’d pay for it. He didn’t want to make this any more difficult than it had to be on her. It had already gotten so difficult.
“I think you’re going to regret this,” she sniffed, before she walked through the revolving door into the frigid Berkshire air and to the waiting driver. “I think you’re going to call me tomorrow and want me back.”
Ezra didn’t know what was kinder: to tell her that she was wrong or to give her hope that she wasn’t. But he knew that he would not.
Instead, he said, “Mimi, I am truly sorry for all of this. I never wanted things to go this way.”
And she gave him a long look like she didn’t believe him, which she probably didn’t, because this had been his choice, and he just as well could have chosen differently. He could have chosen to still get down on one knee and slip his grandmother’s ring on her finger and call her boisterous family in Kansas City with the news and try to reach Henry in London to tell him too. And they probably would have had a perfectly fine life together, even if they hadn’t actually been the perfect match he’d always assumed them to be. Ezra realized this, but he also realized that he was capable of asking for more than perfectly fine—that he desperately wanted more. He’d been chasing a big, expansive, intoxicating love since he was old enough to seek it. And how he’d convinced himself that anyone simply loving him in return was the same thing as openhearted, mountain-moving adoration, he didn’t know. He didn’t have it in him, there in Burton Library with Bruno looking on and Mimi falling apart, to dive into that sort of emotional autopsy. It was enough, for now, to know that he needed to let Mimi go. That he could stop chasing her, stop holding on so tightly to all his plans, because what he was really chasing was something else.
Mimi disappeared out the revolving door and onto the shuttle and into the night.
And Ezra sat there, the mistletoe still hanging above the doorway, and stared out the window at the very place where his big, expansive love had turned him down, and felt, actually, for the first time in a long time, at peace.
THIRTY-SEVEN
