How to End a Love Story(6)

“Ah,” says Helen.

Her mouth is dry and her pulse pounds violently in her head from the effort of act normal, whatever that means here. Grant looks up at her then.

Come on, his expression seems to suggest, this doesn’t have to be weird if we don’t let it.

It’s as though he’s using the kind of psychic connection that’s only created by thirteen years of trying to forget the same thing, and she thinks she might be sick.

“You’ll have to tell us embarrassing stories about Grant later,” Suraya smiles.

“What are we eating?” Helen says instead.

And even as she feels with every fiber of her being that this is wrong, that this can’t possibly be happening, that maybe there should even be laws to prevent this from ever happening again—she finds herself sharing endless appetizers and politely laughing at everyone’s icebreaker jokes with Grant Shepard from opposite ends of the same table.

It becomes a silent game, who can seem more normal about this—maybe they’ll even make it the full twenty weeks exchanging only polite, respectful glances across a table and no one will ever bring up Helen’s dead sister or how she died.

Sometimes I wish you weren’t my sister.

When Suraya suggests they relocate to the rooftop for after-dinner drinks, Helen goes up first to claim a spot while everyone else freshens up and makes phone calls to friends and babysitters. Grant reappears first, two drinks in hand—margaritas, which feel inappropriately festive. There’s an air of slight hesitation in his stance that she finds to be unlike him and is suddenly infuriated by the thought.

“Is one of those for me?” she asks.

“If you want it to be.” He sets it down.

Their natural lives should have taken them far, far away from each other, never to meet or think about each other again after graduation. Helen takes the drink and knows she’s going to lose whatever game they’re playing first.

“I think you should quit,” she says abruptly.

Grant lifts his brows, then sips his drink coolly.

“Do you,” he says, sounding bored.

She immediately hates how he does that, the way nothing she says or does seems to faze him, when she feels nothing but affected. She’s vibrating from a sensation both familiar and strange—being in unexpectedly close proximity to him. Her heart slams against her chest in an impressive effort to meet the wooden deck floor, or perhaps to tackle her sister’s murderer. Not legally true, she reminds herself. It wasn’t his fault. Her wounded heart still tries to punch him through her chest.

“Yes. It’s wildly inappropriate, not to mention cruel, for you to be here right now.”

Helen is aware that she’s doing that thing where she sounds weirdly formal, like she was raised by Victorian ghosts or something, and immediately regrets saying anything at all.

“That’s taking it a bit far, isn’t it?” he says, like a jerk.

“No, it’s not. How—how did this even happen?”

“They sent me your book, I took a meeting, Suraya’s great, she thinks I’m great, here we are.”

“You never should have taken the meeting,” Helen says. She can feel her cheeks flushing from a heady mix of alcohol and anger. “You should have said no. Found something else. Anything else.”

“Yeah,” he laughs. “Well.”

“Don’t you feel like, like a terrible person taking this job?” she asks.

“No, actually, I don’t,” he says, knocking back the rest of his drink. “I have a mortgage and bills to pay and contrary to what someone who lucked into a cushy screenwriting job two seconds after landing in LA might think, jobs don’t just fall out of the sky for the rest of us.”

How dare you! the Victorian ghosts in her mind decry.

“I didn’t luck into this job—this is my book,” she says acidly. “And if you’re having a hard time, that’s too bad, but it’s not really my problem, is it?”

Grant exhales and shuts his eyes tightly, pushing a finger against his temple. He looks like he’s in pain, and she thinks, Good. When he finally speaks, his voice is controlled and quiet, and his eyes are on her.

“Helen, I didn’t want to kill your sister and I’ve had to live with that every day since, and I’m not asking you to forgive me but you know just as well as I do, it could have been anyone’s car she jumped in front of; it just happened to be mine.”

Helen can’t quite believe she’s heard him right. She thinks she glimpses something desperate in his eyes, and bizarrely finds herself wondering what’s happened in Grant Shepard’s life since she last saw him.

“I don’t care,” she hisses. “It was your car. It was you driving.”

Grant flinches and she feels a bloodthirsty kind of satisfaction. This night was supposed to be the start of a new chapter, a career highlight. The fact that she’s thinking about Grant Fucking Shepard tonight seems like a cruel prank of the universe—that even from beyond the grave, little sisters have a talent for inserting themselves into places where they weren’t invited.

“I don’t want you on this show,” Helen finishes.

She feels an itch to punctuate her words with a jab at his chest, but she thinks touching Grant Shepard might be the most inappropriate thing conceivable right now.