How to End a Love Story(9)

Helen thinks she might have to turn around and get back in her car immediately. She’s standing on the sidewalk outside the alfresco restaurant in Mid-City where they agreed to meet and Grant is flirting with the hostess.

“I can’t take credit for it,” he says with an easy grin. “But thanks. I like yours too.”

“We need another menu,” Helen says irritably.

Grant and the hostess-with-the-name-he-likes (Rose, her name tag reads) both glance in Helen’s direction, as if they’ve just remembered her.

“Of course,” Rose the hostess says, shooting Grant a sympathetic look as she grabs another menu. “Right this way.”

They’re seated at a patio table that overlooks the street, under the shade of a vining bougainvillea. Helen is suddenly aware of how visible they are and regrets agreeing to this meeting. His (no subject) email had been short and unexpected—Would like to connect before the room starts, if you’re open. Lunch?

She had forwarded the email to her agent’s assistant, who understood the tacit assignment and coordinated a time and place without fuss or direct contact between them.

“So,” she says, after the waiter has offered them both still and sparkling water, read off the day’s specials (beef tagliata, Italian wedding soup), taken their lunch orders, and left.

Finally.

“So,” Grant agrees, with a hesitant kind of smile. She imagines this must be his best weapon in any argument.

“What did you want to talk about?” Helen asks.

Grant pauses, as if considering his options.

“I didn’t hear from Suraya after the welcome drinks night,” he says, tapping his sunglasses on the table. “Just her assistant confirming my drive-on access details for Monday.”

Helen looks out toward the street. She hopes he doesn’t think she’s forgiven him.

“If you don’t have the decency to quit, that’s on your conscience,” she says. “I’m not going to sabotage the room with last-minute problems, even if I should have known about them sooner.”

She sends him a look of pointed disgust. Grant’s mouth twitches, like he finds this funny somehow. She hates that she always feels ridiculous trying to wear her own anger—like it’s the wrong size after too many winters spent at the back of her closet.

“That’s the thing about Hollywood,” he says, pouring them both a refill of water. “Very few truly decent people left in our industry.”

She gets the impression that he’s laughing internally at her—poor Helen and her silly morals—and finds herself craving that feeling of bloodthirsty victory over him again.

“I bet you think you’re decent,” she says idly, as he lifts his glass for a drink. “Sorry I killed your sister, let me buy you lunch.”

Grant’s glass freezes on its way to his mouth. He sets it down and she watches the veins on his neck work rather spectacularly.

“Helen,” he says quietly. “I think we should set some ground rules.”

“Ground rules,” she repeats slowly. The shape of his words feel strange on her tongue.

“If we’re both going to be in the room, it’s in the best interests of the show for us to be . . . friendly,” Grant says. “Writer to writer.”

You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.

His tousled dark brown hair looks almost chestnut in the sun and the dappled light casts just enough shadow to call attention to the sharp, attractive planes of his face. She thinks it’s bitterly unfair that they share a profession, when he has that face. She remembers Grant Shepard the boy as handsome in a vaguely unattainable way.

Grant Shepard the man is painfully compelling.

“Friendly,” Helen says. “Sure. Professionally, anyway.”

If he notices the addendum, he doesn’t seem to care much. He taps the linen tablecloth, thoughtful.

“We talk a lot about our personal lives in the room,” Grant says. “Your books are set in high school—they’ll probably ask about our shared experiences back then.”

What shared experiences? They never spoke all that much before the accident and they certainly didn’t speak afterward. She thinks that might have been by design, that their teachers and peers carefully steered them in opposite directions those last three weeks of school, as if afraid Helen would one day take out her carefully packaged grief and let it explode all over him inappropriately.

“It’s supposed to be a safe space for discussion,” he says, watching her carefully. “I want to know if there are any topics we’re avoiding. For instance, I wondered how much from your own life you were pulling, with the sister—”

“Michelle is off-limits,” Helen says abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about her. Ever.”

She swallows. She rarely says Michelle’s name out loud these days.

He nods, curt—understood.

The familiar ghost of a thought drifts through her mind—What was it like for you, afterward? It’s a thought she’s always redirected herself from as quickly as possible—because the wondering would inevitably turn to imagining, and the imagining would turn to a moment of voluntary empathy, it must have been fucking terrible for you, and that empathy would mature into guilt—guilt that he even had to think about this thing that Helen herself absolutely refused to let determine more of her life than it already had. And then she would resent the guilt, because she wasn’t the one responsible for him having that memory, and she’d find her way back to anger and the slammed door of her sister’s suicide and who are you really angry with? and the unhealthy spiral would continue and continue until the past and the present blurred into the same reality, reliving instead of reflecting, as her therapist once called it. And so she always resurfaced back around to the general rule that it would be better not to wonder about Grant Shepard at all.