How to End a Love Story(90)

“Ha,” Helen says weakly. A thought occurs to her then. “Has he been out there with my parents, this whole time?”

Nicole nods. “They aren’t talking or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. There’s definitely a Sharks and Jets thing going on out there in the waiting room—no one’s crossing to each other’s sides.”

“Oh.” Helen nods. “That’s good, probably.”

“Though who knows what’s happening now that we’re not out there as buffers,” Nicole says thoughtfully. She laughs at Helen’s expression. “Don’t worry! I’m pretty sure everyone’s mostly worried about you.”

“Right,” Helen says weakly. “Me.”



Grant frowns at the ground in front of him, willing it to stop swimming.

A cup appears instead and he looks up to see the older man he knows is Helen’s father holding out a takeaway cup of tea.

“You should drink something,” he says.

“Thanks,” Grant answers thickly, and takes the tea. It’s lemon ginger, and warms him from the inside. He glances over to the chairs where Helen’s parents have been sitting and sees that her mother has disappeared—to the bathroom, probably.

“You’ve been here a long time,” Helen’s father says, his mouth a grim line.

“You’ve been here a long time too,” Grant says.

“We’re her parents,” her dad says simply.

“Yeah.” Grant nods, and looks back down at the floor.

There’s an unspoken question between them—We’re her parents. Who are you to her?—and Grant can’t answer it, to Helen’s father, to Helen, to himself. He doesn’t really have a right to be anyone to her, but he also doesn’t think he’d be useful to anyone else, anywhere else, right now. He wants to laugh at the way Suraya dismissed him summarily from reporting to work today and feels even more worthless.

Get it together, Shepard.

Grant tries to think of something, anything, he could say to Helen’s father that would fix everything, and realizes he doesn’t even know this man’s name. Helen really never wanted them to meet. Would it be better to respect her wishes or try something desperate?

Helen’s father casts an appraising look at Grant, sighs heavily, then returns to his chair across the room. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing—he should talk to Helen first.

Grant tries for the hundredth time this hour to think of what he’ll say to Helen when he sees her, if he sees her.

He’s never really believed in writer’s block—his dad had laughed at the idea once, saying something like, “Well, car mechanics don’t get to have mechanic’s block, do they?” And Grant had been determined to treat his job with the same unromantic steely air.

The thing is, he’s not so sure mechanics don’t feel blocked sometimes. Grant has tried and failed to repair his own car enough times to respect the amount of creative thinking that goes into finding elegant solutions in the art of car maintenance.

But words have never failed him—at least not dialogue. Prose was trickier; he couldn’t hold a thought long enough to expand it into a proper paragraph, let alone a novel. But dialogue he’s always been able to hear as if the people he’s writing are in the room with him.

He tries to imagine Helen’s voice now but his brain stubbornly continues to avoid all paths leading to hypotheticals.

Let’s not experience this more than once, his psyche seems to suggest. It’s for your own good.



Nicole and Saskia stay long enough to annoy the nurses, and then they act as if they always planned to leave after Helen’s hospital brunch of pudding and a fruit cup.

“Heal fast, babe,” Nicole says, and kisses the top of Helen’s head. “Who are we sending in next? The sad, hot man, or the sad, worried parents?”

“Your mom is really worried,” Saskia says. “I mean, it’s fine, just, you know, a lot of . . . ‘My baby, they won’t let me see her’ kind of thing.”

Helen huffs slightly. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Nicole leans against the doorway, jacket in hand. “I vote for the broody, hot one. You’re already injured, you deserve a little fun.”

“Fun,” Helen repeats. “Right.”

Nicole shrugs her shoulders and drops her voice. “Helen. Helen, I love you. Helen, hmmm . . .” She cracks a smile. “That was my Grant impression, in case you couldn’t tell.”

Helen laughs, genuinely, and winces.

“You’ve convinced me,” she coughs, in a way that makes Nicole actually look worried for a second. “Send in the broody, hot one.”

They slip out and she has the horrifying realization that she should have asked them to borrow a mirror first. She briefly tries to adjust her hair using her distorted reflection in the chrome railings of her hospital bed, then gives up just in time to hear familiar footsteps approach.

“Well,” she breathes, and he’s here. “You look terrible. What happened to you?”

Grant laughs then (she missed that sound, when’s the last time she heard it?), leaning against the doorway. His T-shirt is a wrinkled mess and he looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and she can see the crick in his neck from the way he unfolds himself strangely to drop into the chair nearest to the door, a long ways from her bed.