How to End a Love Story(12)
But seven months ago on Valentine’s Day, Helen had misinterpreted him reaching for his wallet for him reaching for a ring and blurted out, “I don’t wanna get married.” He’d blinked at her and slowly produced his credit card for the check and she had flushed almost as pink as the specialty prix fixe menus on the tables.
“Maybe we should take a break,” Oliver said when they got home, in a gentle voice. “Figure out if this is really something we both want.”
She had nodded and hoped they could move past this, and a week later he had determined, “I deserve someone who can love me back. I just don’t think you’re capable of it.”
“He must be regretting you right now,” Chelsea had said, and ordered another round of drinks for the table. Helen found herself tearing up unexpectedly over her second martini.
“It’s stupid,” she said, and viciously swiped beneath her eyes while Chelsea graciously became fascinated with the tablecloth. “I’m just thinking about the life I almost had with him, and how it probably would have been nice if I’d just been able to say I loved him like a normal fucking person, but I’m being an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Chelsea had said soothingly. “You’re a number one New York Times bestselling author.”
She hates how quickly that actually did make her feel better.
Helen takes special care to do her best by the few people she does love. She thinks ruefully of old friends who probably don’t miss Helen’s defective kind of love—maybe throw in a sister too—and she thinks of her parents, the ones who loved her first. She’s never been able to completely erase the shadow of despair from her parents’ eyes, but Helen has done the very best she possibly can.
This is not doing the best she possibly can.
She wonders if she can still call the whole thing off. She detected some familiar look of complicated guilt in Grant’s eyes at lunch, and she thinks if she were to pick up the phone now, he’d answer. I’ve changed my mind, she’d tell him. I need you off the show. Surely you owe me a favor or two.
Then some contrary part of her decides, no, it’s too late now—he stays.
Helen turns on the sink and washes last night’s dishes as she determines, it’s not really about him at all. It’s about some private rebellion she finds herself relishing in the idea of keeping Grant on the writing staff, despite having spent their last two in-person interactions in open hostility.
What happens next? she keeps finding herself wondering in his company.
It’s been a long time since she remembers feeling this interested in anything, even if it’s an interest wrapped in some heady combination of wrong and go away.
It makes her feel like a different person—like she isn’t a boring Goody Two-shoes who still writes young adult fiction mostly because she doesn’t think her parents could handle reading “harder stuff,” as her agent has called it. There’s nothing in Helen’s books that would suggest she’s had sex or engaged in risky behaviors of any kind.
Her characters pine after each other with the tension of a nineteenth-century romance novel, while poring over long-forgotten eighteenth-century academic texts. The fictional dead sister died a saint, not a hint of heroin in her veins. “They could all probably use a good fuck and a few addictions,” Suraya said in their first meeting, pitching her vision for the soapier series adaptation.
Maybe her parents will find out about Grant Shepard working on The Ivy Papers someday (he could still set fire to himself professionally or die in a car accident, or his episode could get pulled by the network, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, she thinks optimistically), but someday won’t be today, and she feels a new and thrilling kind of power in holding the reins on this piece of information.
She stares at her reflection in her glass cupboard and wonders what Monday—the first day of school, he called it—will bring.
Five
“Helen, would you like to say anything to start us off?”
She looks up, startled by the question from Suraya. Was I supposed to have something prepared? Helen has the sudden mental picture of herself giving a rousing inspirational speech to this room full of strangers (and Grant), and almost laughs. Who do you think you are?
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” she says out loud.
Suraya smiles at her in a don’t worry about it way and turns to the room at large. “Well, you’re all here for a reason, so don’t be afraid to speak up loudly and often. We have some truly great source material to live up to”—here, she nods toward Helen—“and I’m excited we get to be the ones to introduce whole new audiences to these fantastic books. Let’s do them, and the author, who is watching us very closely, proud.”
That gets a few chuckles from the room and Helen hopes for the thousandth time that she isn’t ridiculous for being here, that she shouldn’t be somewhere in Midtown Manhattan with Pallavi and Elyse instead, sipping a martini and saying nonchalantly, I think they’re starting the writers room for my show today, isn’t that cool?
Then Suraya turns to her right and Helen feels a tingling sense of things are about to get worse.
“Grant, you want to add anything?”
Grant sits directly across from her, playing with a retractable pen in a way she finds vaguely familiar. They’re separated by a long, oval table made from solid teak.