But April and Connor’s invitation had reminded him of those bonds he’d forged at college, of how they’d both shown up for his mother’s funeral, even though he hadn’t asked. Of course, Frankie hadn’t shown. They hadn’t spoken in years. He wouldn’t have expected her to.
“Come on, Meems, you’ll love them,” he had said that night over Chinese food. “April and Connor, and Gregory, oh my God, you’d love him, and... just... we were all inseparable.”
“I met Gregory,” Mimi said without looking up. “In the Hamptons.”
Ezra had forgotten—two summers ago, when they were newly together, when Gregory was back from Portland for the week and joined them.
“Right, and he’s great, right? But I want you to meet the rest of them.”
Mimi had raised an eyebrow and her chopsticks hovered in the air and she said: “Is this because ofher?”
“Her?” Ezra honest to God didn’t even know who she meant at first.
“Her,” Mimi said, and then Ezra understood.Her.He and Mimi had never had to have the talk about exclusivity or if they were going to be serious. Ezra always wanted things to be serious, with any new girlfriend. And besides, they’d both ticked those same boxes: monogamy and fidelity were of utmost importance. When they started dating, he was already apartment hunting—he’d gotten too old for roommates, and he made enough money to splurge on a prewar rental with decent plumbing and a doorman—so she started apartment hunting with him. She moved in with him after he signed the lease, and honestly, Ezra was happy. They were a perfect match of two people who both wanted the exact same amount of loyalty (all of it), who both required the exact same amount of honesty (also all of it). It had been this way since the start, and with expectations so clear, it had always been easy, exactly what Ezra thought a relationship should be. They’d talked about their exes in passing—the sort of conversations you had, and then set aside, when you were both so relieved to finallyfind the right fit—and just like everything else in their relationship, they landed on the same page: that those relationships were so far in the rearview mirror they couldn’t be seen, that those were shadows who felt like distant memories. Ezra was surprised that Mimi was even mentioning Frankie. He certainly never did.
That night, he put down his own set of chopsticks and cracked open a fortune cookie that fortuitously read:You have a great adventure in your future!And he held it up for Mimi to read, and she laughed and pushed her copper hair behind her ears and said: “You planned that, didn’t you?” And he grinned in reply, and said, “Please come? I really want you there. And it has nothing to do withher.” And she acquiesced and then she promised she would call to find a flight from Kansas City to Boston or Hartford, Connecticut. They never discussedherafter that, and when he thought about this later, he was never quite sure if this was a blessing or a warning. Maybe both.
Today, Ezra watched Frankie shake her blond hair free of damp snowflakes and wondered if Mimi hadn’t been right all along, that part of him wanted her there as protection, as a shield against Frankie Harriman. But Ezra truly hadn’t known if Frankie would even attend: her showing up to celebrate a life event for old friends, much less as a willing bridesmaid, felt totally out of character, and while there were a slew of surprises to behold this morning, it only just dawned on him that one of the biggest was that Frankie opted back into their circle.
Frankie swung open the door to the coffee shop, and the heat assaulted them.
“Oh, thank the sweet Lord,” Frankie said, more to herself than to him. “Heat and sustenance. I’d forgotten how cold it is here. LA is seventy degrees any day of the year.”
“I need to call the hotel,” Ezra said.
“I can’t do anything without caffeine,” Frankie said. “Can we agree, drinks first, call second?”
Ezra acquiesced. He could really use some coffee, and besides, what was he going to say?Hello, I may be married, but if I’m not, please accept my grandmother’s engagement ring?
Frankie scooted out a chair for him, he plopped down, and she went to the counter.
He didn’t bother telling her what to order: it was exactly what he’d always gotten, and he assumed she knew as much. Ezra never cared much about change, which he thought was overrated. He liked what he liked; he was who he was. Frankie, though, had always been like an impressionist painting: different from every angle, different in each light. But Ezra was just Ezra. He liked his coffee with a splash of cream and one sugar, and it had been that way since he was eighteen and started drinking coffee once he was done growing. He’d read research that caffeine could stunt your growth, and he was nothing if not a faithful abider of the rules.
Frankie returned to the table, pushed the to-go cup his way.
“Splash of cream, one sugar.” She also got two buttered bagels.
“Hasn’t changed.” He nodded.
She raised her eyebrows as if to say:I figured, and he hated that he wanted to apologize for this. Like morphing his coffee order into something more interesting might mean that he had evolvedinto someone more interesting too. But this was always part of their flawed foundation: that she gravitated toward the storm, while he preferred locking the doors and shuttering the windows until the storm passed. Ezra studied her and again thought of Mimi: how he could have loved two women so wildly different. Mimi, like him, was ordered, measured, reliable,grown-up. They’d been, after all, a perfect match in their meet-and-greet questionnaire. Ezra eyed Frankie across the table and corrected himself: Frankie didn’t gravitate toward the storm, shewasthe storm. Who, he regretted having to remind himself, he may have married last night. Whether it was the coffee or the notion, Ezra’s intestines contracted.
Frankie pulled out a chair, drank her own coffee for a quiet beat and broke off half her bagel and swallowed it in a few quick bites, and then folded her hands in front of her, resting them on the table.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he replied. His stomach lurched, but he knew he needed to eat too, so he nibbled on the bagel, then found himself hungrier than he realized and kept going.
“It seems improbable that you don’t remember what happened...” Her voice drifted as she tried to drill down on what she really wanted to say, though Frankie often said one thing and meant something else entirely. “I mean, you were always the smart one.”
Ezra wondered if maybe she didn’t think she knew him like he still believed that he knew her. That wouldn’t shock him—he’d always been more sentimental. It wasn’t that he thought of her often. Sometimes, sure, but often? Not really. Sittinghere, across from her in the cozy coffee shop, with Christmas carols lilting from the overhead speakers and with Middleton all around them, it was easy to imagine that he’d never forgotten her, hadn’t really stopped thinking of her at all.
Which was insane, he told himself. Insane! Frankie Harriman had driven him crazy, had split him in two, had withered him into a shell of himself, and once he departed Middleton, having packed up his (their) dorm room the day after graduation and driven to New York City with his mom, who was in remission again by then, he told himself that leaving her behind, leaving heranywhere, was the only possible solution. There was a quick phone call a week later, he remembered. A finality, the nail in the proverbial coffin.Closure, his mom said at the time, even though she’d liked Frankie, but then his mom had liked everyone. A decade ago, Ezra found it reassuring to tell himself that he was in control of his choices and his destiny, and so, on the winding drive down the Taconic Parkway, and in the days and weeks later, as he unpacked his boxes in his brother’s one-bedroom apartment (they built a temporary wall in the living room to create a small room for Ezra) a few blocks from NYU School of Law, he repeated this mantra:Frankie Harriman is out of your life. This is a very good thing.
Now, he sipped the coffee she had brought him and wished that he were in less pain, that his vision weren’t fuzzy, that his older brother, Henry, weren’t all the way in London or that Mimi or Gregory were here to tell him he was ok. He wasn’t ok, but just hearing them say it might make it more true all the same. What Ezra wanted was a support system. What Ezra had (mostly) was a brother in Great Britain, a wonderful butflaky friend in Gregory, and a girlfriend whom he wanted to marry but who would assuredly and messily ditch him when she discovered whatever it was that he couldn’t remember about last night.
“Why would I lie to you?” he asked. “Why would I tell you I don’t remember last night if I did?” Besides, he wanted to add: the one thing he’d never been with her was untruthful.
“I don’t know. Maybe because you’re a lawyer. Isn’t getting married and breaking and entering the type of stuff you guys manipulate, like, daily?” Frankie winced and massaged the back of her head. “My head is killing me.” Her hand lingered. “I think... I think I have a bump here?”
