How to End a Love Story(7)

“Well, I’m not quitting,” Grant says, his eyes full of cold, hard nothing. “So if you want to get rid of me, take it up with Suraya.”

The sound of a small herd of TV writers clambering up the deck pulls them both out of the conversation. Grant slips on a mask of polite indifference as they approach. What a monster, Helen thinks automatically.

“I’m heading out early,” he says to Tom, the husband in the married-couple writing team. “Great seeing you guys again. Everyone else, looking forward to working with you all.”

He salutes Helen with a bitter twist of a smile and a glass of water, then heads downstairs.

The small Asian writer who looks like she’s just out of school—Saskia—takes the spot Grant vacated and smiles at Helen in a hesitant, hopeful kind of way.

“It’s so great to meet you,” she says in a rush of energy, the most she’s spoken all night. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, I’m such a big fan. It’s my first staffing job. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to even get an interview.”

New scene. Helen clicks over to a fresh mental page and forces a smile back at Saskia. “It’s my first TV job too,” she admits. “I feel like I got thrown in the deep end.”

“We can look out for each other, then,” Saskia says eagerly. “I can’t believe how young you are, to have accomplished so much.”

Helen finds something familiar in this sentence. In the last few years, she’s grown used to being approached by other young, female, Asian writers—at events, in her DMs, in her email inbox occasionally, when the intrepid ones manage to find a cracked door. They look up to her, they tell her. They want to know how she did it, they’re proud of her, and maybe they’re a little bit envious too. She used to respond to every request for advice—she was flattered, she was eager to help, and maybe it was a safe passage to channel some neglected guilt too. I’m a good role model, she told herself with every carefully crafted response. I’m a good citizen in my community. I leave roadmaps and signposts for the ones coming after me. But eventually it became too much—more success yielded a deluge—and she felt more guilt to push aside with every unanswered message.

She looks at Saskia now and tries to see something like a little sister.

Michelle would have hated you. The vicious thought comes unbidden. Too desperate.

Across the deck, Suraya gives Helen a you good? kind of look.

Helen swallows. I am not good.

The thought pings through her heart and her mind and then her entire body insistently, and she imagines saying it out loud. She imagines how Suraya would look at her if Helen started tearing up her carefully selected, apparently beloved writing staff before they even started day one in the writers room. She imagines quitting and going back to Manhattan, tail between her legs—turns out if you make it here, you can’t actually make it “anywhere.”

She straightens her shoulders. She can handle this.

She’s not going to give Grant Shepard the satisfaction.

Helen nods at Suraya and smiles. She’s great.



Grant manages to stave off the panic attack the entire forty-five-minute Uber ride back from the west side to Silver Lake. As soon as his home security system beeps, it all falls apart.

His vision is spotty and there’s a faint ringing in his ears and there’s not enough air in the room as he stumbles into the kitchen. He pulls out his cell phone with shaking hands and thumbs through his contacts list clumsily—he could call his therapist, but it’s late and she has kids. Fern, his agent, is dismissed immediately. She’s allergic to feelings.

He scrolls past more contacts—other TV writers, people he’s poured his heart out to in closed, professional settings when they were all on the clock and opening personal veins while panning for story gold. None of them are personally invested enough to talk Grant through a panic attack at almost eleven o’clock on a Friday night.

Finally, his thumb swipes past the wet drops—fuck, he’s crying—and lands on “Karina, wardrobe.”

She picks up on the third ring.

“I have five minutes, then I have to go back to set. What’s up?” she asks.

“I, uh, I’m . . . I’m having a panic attack,” Grant says through the phone.

“Shit,” she says. “Is there anyone with you?”

“No,” he says, and feels like a loser.

“Breathe,” she instructs him. “Longer exhales than inhales. One . . . two . . . three . . .”

She keeps counting on the phone with him till ten and his breathing is regular again.

“Thanks,” he says. “Sorry to bother you at work. It’s just . . . I have no one else to call.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asks.

“Um.” He thinks about how unfair this is to her, how they broke up five months ago, how he still has to return some of her vinyl records. “No. It’s not important. You should get back to set.”

There’s a pause on the other side of the line.

Then she sighs. “You should find someone you can talk to, Grant. Not me, obviously, but . . . someone.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Have a good night,” she says, and hangs up.

Grant knows he could probably find someone to talk to easily enough. There’s his therapist, for a start, and he’s probably due for a session. But there was also a time when he might have thought eleven o’clock wasn’t so late and he could have found himself at a bar, beside a pretty face with a sympathetic ear, before midnight. Everyone likes you, his agent had said and it’s true, for the most part. He’s easy to look at and just sad enough to be interesting.