How to End a Love Story(109)

Grant follows her instructions. Helen smiles and shrugs.

“That’s pretty much it,” she says. “I’m never totally sure I’m doing it right.”

“You do it fine,” Mom says briskly, from the hallway. “It is not that complicated. Helen thinks too much. The important thing is we still have a connection to her. Chinese people care about this kind of thing, the living and the dead—we are all still connected, so we honor that connection.”



They get married outdoors in late August, on a sheep farm in Ireland. It’s a smallish, intimate affair of just under sixty guests, mostly immediate friends and family. The weather is suspiciously perfect.

“I feel like I’m in a fucking Thomas Hardy novel,” Nicole says as she sweeps up her bouquet and peeks out the window of the seventeenth-century croft house where they’ve been getting ready. “Lots of people and a couple sheep arriving out there.”

“Haha,” Helen says, and tries to ignore the churning sensations in her stomach. She’s wearing a simply structured dress of ivory silk crepe, with a long row of silk buttons up the back that had taken the better part of an hour for Nicole to hook up with a hairpin (making jokes all the while on the odds of whether Grant would torture her with his patience or “really lean into a bodice-ripper vibe” at the end of the night).

“I think these could probably seduce a dashing farmhand if the situation called for it,” Nicole murmurs, adjusting her boobs in a gilt mirror by the entrance. “Right?”

“Your tits look great,” Helen says. “I feel kind of like I might be dying.”

Nicole blots her lipstick. “Say the word, I’ll get the getaway car.”

Helen shakes her head. “No, I think this is normal. Right?”

Nicole shrugs. “You tell me, babes. How’s it feel, standing on the precipice of happily ever after?”

Helen lets out a strangled noise that sounds like a laugh, maybe.

She’s terrified of it. She’s terrified that she’s incapable of wanting something and getting it, of real life obliterating perfect weather and happy endings if she goes on for an extra chapter, or even an extra sentence. That just means you really want it, she reminds herself, as her heart hammers in agreement.

So she nods and says, “I’m ready. Let’s go.”



All things considered, it’s a pretty normal day.

The string quartet has some trouble finding a spot where both the guests and the bridal party can hear them, the florist forgets to add forget-me-nots to Helen’s bouquet, and there are some pesky wrinkles that Nicole just can’t steam out of the heirloom veil that’s been in storage for the better part of a century.

Still, when Helen takes her father’s arm and the sounds of Canon in D fill the air, she can’t help but feel the thrill of something a little extraordinary. They’re standing just out of view and Helen has to remind herself how to breathe, and they take a step forward.

“Slow down,” Dad says as they approach the makeshift aisle created by a profusion of chamomile flowers planted by Grant’s mother months ago, in anticipation of this day. “You’re walking too fast.”

“I’m walking a normal pace,” Helen says.

They’re walking down the aisle now, and with every step, Helen can see familiar faces who have known her at various points in her life. She feels a strange kind of nostalgia–sensory overload, as every smiling face unlocks some memory from the past—drinking champagne out of plastic cups, celebrating her first book deal at a hotel bar, laughing in a hospital over dirty magazines, crying in a bathroom over a bad book review, falling from the swings in a backyard, baking banana bread for the first time.

She looks up then, and—it’s him.

Grant Shepard. Grant Fucking Shepard, good in a room, great in a bed, and the improbable love of my damn life.

He grins, like he can read her mind. When she finally reaches him and he lifts the blusher of her veil, he whispers in her ear, “It’s nice to see you.”

She shivers a little and looks back at the crowd. She sees his mom first, her heart in her eyes, clasping the hand of the Irish sheep farmer she married six months ago. She sees her own parents, sitting in the front row, holding hands. Mom wears a brittle expression, and the corner of her mouth can’t seem to decide if it wants to turn up or down. Dad looks like he might cry at any minute.

Helen looks to the other side of the aisle and sees Nicole eyeing Grant’s father with blatant sexual interest. Nicole spots her and gives Helen a winking nice.

Grant squeezes her hand.

“Come hang out here with me,” he says quietly, and she looks up into his laughing eyes. “I missed you all morning.”

She smiles and feels a tug at the back of her dress.

“Shelley, no!” Grant’s mom exclaims, as a rogue sheep wearing a flowery collar chews on the silk crepe of Helen’s wedding dress.

Grant leans closer and her hand itches to reach out and touch his hair.

“The sheep’s name is Michelle,” he says. “If you can believe it.”

“Hold for wardrobe,” their officiant, an episodic director, quips.

They wait as Nicole wrestles Helen’s train from the sheep and Helen looks up into Grant’s eyes and thinks, This is it. She thinks wryly of how much easier things could have been for them in a different timeline, where they made a few different decisions, where everyone made some slightly different choices along the way. It would have been an entirely different story.