How to End a Love Story(84)

“I . . . it’s not . . . it wasn’t on purpose,” Helen says finally.

“So it is him,” Mom says, and it sounds like she’s spitting out him.

“He’s not . . .” Helen trails off, because she doesn’t know what she can say to make this better. He’s not that bad. He’s not that important to me. He’s not going to be around much longer.

“Why?” Mom hisses.

“I didn’t know he was going to be on the show. Really, I didn’t. I told you, I’m not the showrunner.”

“What other secrets are you keeping from us?” Mom bursts out, sounding hysterical.

Dad reaches out to calm her and Helen feels the blood rush to her cheeks.

“I’m not . . .” Helen inhales and exhales. She doesn’t want to lie to them. “I didn’t want to keep this a secret. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

“My own daughter,” Mom says in disbelief. She stands.

“Mom.”

“I will not eat here,” Mom says, and after a quick, harsh word to Dad in Cantonese, she exits.

Helen looks back at her dad, who suddenly looks so much older and more tired than she remembers him.

“Dad,” she says.

He puts up a staying hand.

“You should have told us,” he says firmly. And stands, and leaves.

Helen blinks back tears and waits a few minutes, until she’s certain her parents have left in an Uber. She pays for their meal to be boxed up and gets in her car and drives down the freeway until she’s over the hill and in the familiar winding streets of Silver Lake.

She rings the doorbell and keeps ringing until the door swings open. Grant appears in sweats; he has headphones around his neck.

“Sorry, I was writing . . .” He trails off when he looks at her face. “Something’s happened.”

“My parents . . .” she says, and tries not to cry. He pulls her into a hug wordlessly and she feels suddenly like she’s in a twilight zone, driving to the homecoming king’s house to cry about her parents. If my seventeen-year-old self could see me now, she thinks humorlessly.

They separate, and she finds somehow they’ve crossed the threshold into his house. He shuts the door and she brushes the moisture from her face. She owes him a better explanation.

“They saw your name on an email.”

“That’s . . . unfortunate,” Grant says, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

“They don’t even know . . .” Helen trails off as she thinks about how her mother would react if she knew the full truth of the past several months. “And they just . . . it was exactly what I thought would happen, if they ever found out. It was exactly what I thought it would be.”

Grant reaches her side again and strokes her back soothingly. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You tried to get me to quit, remember?”

“I should have known how much this would hurt them,” she says, shaking her head. “I shouldn’t have . . .”

She looks over to him and finds he’s watching her intently, a frown between his brows.

“How could I do this to them?” she asks, and she’s not sure who she’s asking.

“You didn’t do anything to them,” Grant answers, and she knows he doesn’t understand. “They’re your parents. They’ll be mad for a while, and then they’ll come around. It’s not . . .”

He trails off, and she gives him a look. “Please don’t say ‘It’s not that bad.’”

“I was going to say, it’s not the end of the world,” he says.



He can see she’s turning over all this information in her head and it’s driving her to an inevitable conclusion.

“Helen,” he says, trying to pull her out of it. “I know you didn’t want this to happen, but they were going to find out eventually. If not during production, then once the show aired. They were always going to find out.”

Helen nods slowly and he wishes she would look at him.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” he says.

She looks up at him sharply then.

“We can’t do this anymore,” she says. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he repeats, stunned.

“It’s bad enough you’re working on the show; it’s just pure dumb luck they haven’t found out about . . . about us.”

About us. What could anyone even know about us, Grant wonders, when he’s not sure himself. It’s been just over two months of having the confusing right to claim an us with Helen, and he feels like he’s still untangling the knots in his brain from that first night they spent together in his childhood bedroom.

“I disagree,” Grant says, then adds as an afterthought, “Obviously.”

“We knew this couldn’t go anywhere—we said that from the start,” Helen says, standing, and he has the horrible feeling she’s already made up her mind, maybe before she even walked through the door. “It’s the only reason I agreed to it.”

“Not the only reason,” Grant says, and he can’t keep the harshness out of his tone. “I remember some other reasons you found compelling enough.”

“Why are you fighting me on this?” Helen says, and she seems so genuinely confused, it’s a stab to the gut.