How to End a Love Story(3)
“I went to high school with the author,” he says finally.
“That’s perfect—”
“No,” Grant says grimly. “It’s not. She didn’t like me.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, everyone likes you,” Fern says, sounding a little maternally offended on his behalf. “Besides, she’s not going to be in the meeting; it’s just the showrunner and executive producers.”
“I . . .” He takes a steadying breath—exhale longer than you inhale—and shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about this right now. There has to be something else. What about Jason’s spin-off show? That was a good meeting, wasn’t it?”
“They don’t have the budget for a writer at your level,” Fern says evenly. “And you’re not taking a pay cut back down to co-producer when we’ve finally clawed our way up to co-EP.”
Grant’s IMDb profile succinctly condenses each rung of his career so far into a one-line credit—staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, co–executive producer. Other writers he came up with never managed to make it past that first credit, and there really aren’t many lines separating him from them. Grant knows he doesn’t deserve the success he’s had and it’s always felt that much more precarious for it.
Grant downs an Advil and massages his temples. “What about features?”
“As soon as you’ve got a draft of that spec for me, I’m happy to read it. In the meantime, you’re a TV writer. You make money for us both as a TV writer. And this is a straight-to-series, prestige”—he scoffs here, but Fern overrules him—“very buzzy TV show. The studio execs all loved your materials, the showrunner’s already read your sample. Are you really going to make me tell them they wasted their time?”
Grant sighs. He knows, somehow, this is a mistake, even as he says, “Fine, I’ll take the meeting.”
That night he spends some time googling Helen Zhang, YA author. Her author photo comes up first and she looks more or less the way he remembers her, except older and more expensive. Her eyes are intelligent and assessing, her posture as straight as it was that day in the church at her sister’s funeral. She’s not smiling—Helen has never smiled in his memory, so that makes sense—and he can still see the stiff, serious editor-in-chief of the school paper in her, after all this time.
Their paths rarely crossed before the night that changed his life forever—Helen hung out with the nerdy, Ivy League–obsessed crowd and was not-so-secretly judgy about him and his friends on the football team and cheer squad, rolling her eyes at pep rallies and homecoming and everything that had given his life meaning when he was seventeen years old.
And afterward . . . afterward, Helen hadn’t looked at him at all. She looked through him whenever they were in the same room.
Grant considers what Fern would say if he told her he couldn’t take this job for “mental health reasons.” He laughs to himself—Fern would probably remind him of his mortgage (he shouldn’t have bought the bungalow in Silver Lake, but he’d thought The Guys would have at least one more season before its untimely cancellation) and dangle attractive numbers in front of him (minus ten percent) and tell him therapy costs money.
When he gets the call a few days later that they want to offer him the job, he’s past the point of putting up a fight. Therapy does cost money, and if Helen Zhang has a problem with him being on the writing staff of her TV show, well.
She can take that up with his entertainment lawyer.
Three
Helen stretches in the parking lot at the foot of Fryman Canyon, the early-morning chill still hanging over all the cars like a shadowy blanket.
“I’m stupidly overbooked on meetings, but I’d love for you to join me on my daily morning hike,” the email from Suraya, the showrunner, reads. “Fryman’s a pretty one if you’ve never done it, and it’s right up the street from my house.”
Helen looks up Suraya’s Studio City address on Zillow (purchased for a modest $1.3 million nine years ago) and clicks through all the photos of the interior with nosey curiosity. Further research reveals Suraya’s partner is a “mixed media artist” and they have two darling elementary-school-aged children.
She thinks of texting these findings to her two closest author friends, Pallavi and Elyse. There was a time when she would have tossed that Zillow link into their group chat without a second thought, and they would have descended upon this new information like ants invited to a picnic.
Pallavi, Elyse, and Helen met when they were all young aspirings almost a decade ago, at an overcrowded bookstore event where it was impossible to hear the celebrated author’s answers from the back. Pallavi had a meager YouTube following of twenty thousand subscribers at the time and Elyse had already published a collection of short stories. Helen had been an assistant at a publishing house that specialized in academic anthologies, fantasizing about the day when her bosses realized they had a literary genius crafting scheduling emails.
They weren’t the type of friends who met up every weekend for brunch. Elyse thought Pallavi was kind of desperate. Pallavi thought Elyse was too judgmental. Helen was sure they both found her too serious to be any fun. But they all got their first book deals within months of each other—a coincidence that felt like fate in their early twenties, and theirs became a strategic sisterhood. They met up several times a month for “scheming sessions,” where they swapped information on the details of their budding careers and answered each other’s questions (which author photo makes me look the most intriguing, would you actually pick up my book if it had this godawful cover) with the honesty of young strivers who respected each other’s grand ambitions.