How to End a Love Story(18)

“Not on the table.” Suraya rolls her eyes. “We’re not going to be a house divided this early in the game. The studio would lose all faith in us.”

“I’m just not very good at being cool,” Helen says. “I’m never going to be like Grant.”

Suraya laughs. “I don’t need you to be like Grant; I need you to be like you. This nervous, scared girl, this isn’t you. This is just . . .” She snaps her fingers. “This is just because you don’t trust us yet. That’s on me.”

“No, Suraya, you’ve been great—”

Suraya holds up a hand. “I’m the boss, I get to say whose fault this is, and it’s always mine. I should have known it’d take more than dinner and drinks to win you over.”

“I’m won over,” Helen says quietly. “I told you, I trust you.”

“Babe, you have to get better at detecting your own bullshit,” Suraya laughs. “It’s fine. We’ll fix this. Go home.”

The next morning, when Suraya informs them they’re all going on a mandatory “writers room camp bonding retreat” the first weekend of November, Helen feels slightly shamed knowing it’s her fault.

“Yay,” Eve says, shooting Tom a subtle shit, we need a babysitter look.

“Camping, like, in the woods?” Owen says, instinctively reaching for his cell phone as if it were an emotional support dog. “With bugs and bears and, like, leaves and shit?”

“Dibs on the top bunk,” Grant says as he swivels in his chair.

Did he already know this was coming? Helen wonders. She feels the hot sting of failure as Grant shoots her a bland, friendly smile.





Seven




Helen opts to drive herself to the cabin—it turns out everyone else lives on the east side or in the Valley, and she doesn’t feel like driving forty-five minutes across town for a stifling carpool. Besides, she likes driving alone. Listening to music without worrying about what other people think of her secondhand playlists, switching to podcasts when she gets bored of her own thoughts, she feels more like herself than she has the entire time she’s been in LA. The two-hour drive from Santa Monica to Forest Falls goes fast, the San Bernardino Mountains in the distance growing larger and larger until they finally disappear because she’s driving in them.

The first person she sees is Grant, sitting in a lawn chair on the wraparound deck of a large A-frame cabin. He stands as she parks.

“Hi,” she says uncertainly. They haven’t had any one-on-one interactions outside the writers room since that first week in the parking lot. Have you ever willingly spoken to Grant Shepard outside of official classroom time? No, of course not, Your Honor. “Who else is here?”

“Everyone else left fifteen minutes late and got stuck in traffic,” Grant says.

She walks around to the trunk to grab her bag.

“I can get that—”

“No thanks,” she says, hefting her weekender bag out.

“Don’t be stupid,” Grant says, and takes it anyway.

The inside of the cabin isn’t what she expected—there’s really only one room. It’s an open floor plan with two large pullout couches downstairs and four bunk beds in the loft area upstairs. There’s a large chandelier made of antlers that throws ghoulish shadows on the wooden walls, which are covered from inch to inch by framed landscape paintings.

Grant follows her in, her baggage in tow. “The downstairs bathroom is definitely haunted,” he says. “By spiders. I’m in one of the bunk beds upstairs. Where do you want to sleep?”

“I’ll take one of the pullout couches. I can share with Saskia,” she says.

Grant tosses her bag down and they both realize at the same time that there’s nothing to do now but wait for everyone else to arrive. It occurs to her that she might be overdressed for the setting, in a black turtleneck and leggings. He’s wearing a faded gray sweatshirt and sweatpants and he looks like—someone’s boyfriend. The thought comes unbidden, and she scrambles for an excuse to look anywhere else.

“Is there tea?” she asks, and moves to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

She opens cabinet doors at random and finds mugs and tea but no kettle. She feels the sudden, solid warmth of his body behind her as he reaches above her to grab a tarnished silver kettle from the top shelf.

“Here,” he says, holding it out to her.

She takes it and turns to the sink. She hesitates, then—“Do you want some?”

He looks up, surprised. “Sure.”

She fills the kettle and sets it on the gas range and, after a few seconds of struggle, manages to get a fire going.

“Suraya thinks you don’t trust us,” Grant says.

Helen doesn’t turn around. “So she did tell you that.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Helen exhales. “Not with you.”

Grant shakes his head. “Why are you always like this?”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” she says.

“You make things harder for yourself. You’re prickly and defensive when you don’t have to be.”

“What, should I try to be like you and campaign to be everyone’s favorite person in the whole entire world all the time instead?” she asks dryly, as the kettle starts to whistle.