How to End a Love Story(104)

But what if it’s too late by then?

If she ignores her feelings for another moment, she might never feel anything again. Helen suspects she knows this because she’s done it before, and the long stretch of time between Michelle’s funeral and those first thudding starts of emotion with Grant were marked by a vast stretch of nothing, nothing, nothing.

So she slips off her designer heels and heads for the elevator, dodging overly familiar producers and curious strangers as she goes. The elevator doors open, then close, and she finds herself trapped in a mirrored box gasping back sudden tears as the floor jerks upward in that slow, creaking way old elevators have. The doors open again, and a wall of framed black-and-white photographs of the not-so-distant Hollywood past blurs as she rushes down the carpeted hallway to her room at the end of the floor.

There are roses and a bottle of champagne waiting outside her door, along with a note.

Congratulations on a job well done!

With love from,

Suraya, Grant, Owen, Nicole, Saskia, Tom, Eve, and the entire Ivy Papers family <3





Helen isn’t sure why this note is instantly the bleakest thing she’s ever read in her life, and she hastens to open the heavy mahogany door before anyone sees her ugly cry over absolutely nothing. She opens the champagne and drinks straight from the bottle. She takes the bouquet of roses, opens her window, and viciously deheads them one at a time—fluttering red bombs of petals onto the boulevard below. He hates me, he hates me not.

She opens her laptop and pulls up the document she’s been working on for the last four months—the one she still hasn’t told her agent about in case it all falls apart.

Letters You’ll Never Read.scriv.

It’s a working title, a placeholder for a pithier, more audience-tested title, if she ever reaches the finish line. When she reaches the finish line. Each chapter is a letter to Michelle, the completion of an old therapy prompt (and what would you say to your sister, if you could talk to her now?) that Helen resolutely rejected for the last fourteen years as she combed Michelle’s hard drive looking for a suicide letter instead.

She’s written of old gossip and future plans, catalogued childhood memories and collected lessons learned into a rambling one-way correspondence to be edited into something resembling a book later.

But she doesn’t have an ending.

Helen opens her Scrivener file to the blank last chapter, labeled—Here’s Where I Leave You. It’s the one she’s been putting off.

Why not now, why not here. Helen takes another swig of champagne.

Her cursor blinks back at her.

Then she starts typing.



Dear Michelle,

I’ve finally given up on hearing from you first.



Dear Michelle,

More than an afterlife, I hope someday I’ll turn a corner and there you’ll be. I’ll get everything right this time.



Dear Michelle,

Before I say goodbye, I want you to know that I’ve been doing just fine without you. I don’t feel any guilt at all because it wasn’t my fault, and fuck you one more time by the way, and I refuse to miss someone who didn’t want to be here in the first place.

I want you to know all of that, but I’m starting to suspect it’s my own bullshit that I have to get better at detecting.

I’m not fine. I haven’t been for a while, and I blamed you for so long because the last thing you ever did was teach me how much loving can hurt.

I loved you and you left anyway. I tried not to dwell on it, tried not to ask myself how I could have done everything better, tried not to feel anything. And then two months after you died, I went to college and I told a boy I loved him, a week after we met. He was embarrassed, and I laughed out loud and told him I didn’t mean it of course, it had just felt like too perfect a moment to pass up saying it out loud. I never had before, not even to you. I wasted my first I love you, and after that I didn’t want to say it to anyone else, ever again.

Then I fell in love for the first time, for real.

It made me want to fix something I’d been pretending wasn’t broken: my own barely beating heart.

The problem is, I don’t know where to begin.

If I was writing one of those science-fiction novels Dad used to read to us, I’d start by inventing time travel and going back to our last fight in my bedroom. I’d come knock on your door and I’d tell you I’m sorry, and I love you.

And then I’d push that lever back even farther, and I’d find our grandparents and I’d teach them how to say those things to our parents first.

And then I’d come back to the present day to see what was different.

Maybe nothing.

Since this isn’t a science-fiction story, I’ll start here instead:

I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you while you were living, and I wish you could be sorry for all the ways you’ve hurt me since you died. If I had a second chance, I would do so many things differently. But I couldn’t get behind the steering wheel of your life that night and force you to stay, and I’ve been mad at you for so long without it changing a damn thing.

That’s suited me fine up till now. You’re the demon I don’t want to exorcise. If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good. But I want to be healthy. And I want to be happy, though I’ve never trusted happiness. To me, happiness is a fleeting, heartbeat-to-heartbeat experience that comes and goes and hopefully comes back. I worry happily-ever-afters don’t exist for people like us.