How to End a Love Story(95)

He’s always been so sure his next job could be his last job that he’s said yes to practically every meeting, every new show submission Fern has sent him. He thinks maybe he’s spent more time on the craft of getting the job than on the craft of writing itself, and every time he hears himself pitched as good in a room, he feels the sting of what it implies.

Good in a room, but not a creative genius by any means.

Good in a room, if you need someone to fill an empty seat for a while.

Good in a room: he’ll win you over and convince you just how much you need him, when really, he’s the one who needs you.

He isn’t even sure which of his own ideas he would want to develop into something real. He has old pilot samples that, combined with his list of credits on other people’s shows, have been good enough to get him meetings. He remembers being excited about those pilots once, years ago, when he wrote them. But when he scans them now, they feel like an outdated snapshot of his brain and he isn’t sure he could re-create that version of himself if he tried.

He knows he has the kind of career now that if he showed his IMDb page to his twenty-two-year-old self, that Grant Shepard would think he could drop dead tomorrow and have achieved his life’s ambitions.

But that was before her.

Before he’d had the maddening, exhilarating experience of loving someone who casually thought he could and should do better, that he hadn’t reached the peaks of his potential yet.

“It’s a curse,” Helen had said to him once, when he had expressed admiration that she always seemed to create new goals for herself as soon as she achieved them. She’d smiled, a little wistfully. “I’ll never truly be happy. I know as soon as I have the thing I want, there’ll be something just . . . peeking into view over there, that I want just as desperately.”

He thinks of their Forest Falls trip, back in early November, and how she’d called up to Suraya, “I hate hiking anyway.”

Helen is a mountain climber if he’s ever known one, and he thinks he would have been happy to climb mountains with her for the rest of their lives. He would have reminded her to stop sometimes, to look back on how far she’d come and take some time to enjoy it. And she’d have helped him to keep walking past the familiar peaks he’d already climbed and circled before, urging them both onward. Come on, there’s a better view just around the corner.

He wonders if maybe he could do that for himself. If loving Helen—even if it was never really his right to love her in the first place—means he gets to carry some version of her with him forever. She hopes he’ll get over this. He doesn’t want to get over this, over her, at all. He wants to hold on to this hurt and wrap it in plastic and store it somewhere safe, because it’s probably all he’ll ever have left of her.

The last day his badge gives him access to the lot, Grant packs up his laptop and walks through the soundstages on his way to the parking lot. The main unit is filming on location somewhere else and the scent of sawdust is thick in the air, as the art director oversees the construction of a new set for the last six episodes of the season.

They’re tearing down a coffee shop set they built weeks ago for his episode to make room for it, and his footsteps leave a trail in the sawdust as he walks through the space. On the other side of the now defunct coffee shop is a bedroom set for the main character of the series—it’s Helen’s favorite of their standing sets. He remembers her hitting him on the shoulder the first time the writers room did a walk-through of the soundstages and they reached the bedroom.

“It’s so good,” she kept saying. “It looks exactly like how I pictured it. They’re so good.”

And the art team is good. He’s pretty sure they’ve won their fair share of Emmys in the last decade.

But he thinks it’s also a credit to Helen, that when she pictures something—a bedroom, a goal, a future, she finds a way to turn it into a reality. He wishes she’d been able to picture a future with him in it. If she’d wanted it enough, he’s certain, somehow, they would have found a way to make it work.

He sits down on the floor of the fake bedroom and listens as the walls of the coffee shop fall down on the other side, the buzzing chain saws filling the air with even more sawdust.

His phone rings then, and it’s his mom.

“Grant, sweetie, you’ll never believe what’s happened.”

He listens and reacts appropriately as she tells him that the sale on the house closed very suddenly over the weekend, and they have some contractors (she Yelped them this time!) coming to do some work, and so she has just three weeks until she’s off to Ireland. The sheep farm isn’t even ready for her, but it’ll give her a chance to explore all the parts of the country that aren’t close by.

“Now, I still have some boxes of your stuff, if you want them, or I can put them in storage, it’s no problem. There’s just some things that are too heavy to ship, you know? Like your nightstands and the couch in your bedroom, which I tried to donate but, honey, no one wants them.”

He’s about to tell her not to bother, to just toss it, when it suddenly occurs to him that he might never see his childhood home or have any reason to return to Dunollie, New Jersey, ever again after this.

“No,” he finds himself saying. “I’ll come pick them up. I’ll drive.”