Page 69 of How to Write a Rom-Com

“You can’t flick me. I’m dying!” she says, wagging a pointed finger at me.

I throw my hands up in the air. “You’re dying but I’m not allowed to offer you lemonade? Double standards,” I grunt. Finally, she sits up, reaching a hand for me to pull her up from a prone position. “What’s the matter? Do you want to go in?” I ask, concerned by how clammy her skin is.

She flicks me.

“Jo!” I whine.

“What I want, my love,” she starts, taking a breath after every few words, “is for you to stop treating me like I’m a glass vase on the edge of a counter.” She reaches her hands out and places them on either side of my face. Her fingers feel more wrinkled, but still soft in signature Josie fashion.

“Well, that is a very silly analogy,” I reply. “I would just move the vase off the edge of the counter. I only wish I could do that with you.”

She sighs. I take hold of each of her wrists, and squeeze them, wishing I could hold on to her, hold her still, keep her here, in one place, just a moment longer. It’s the same wish I’ve had my entire life—when holidays were cut too short, birthdays spent over video calls, moments of happiness with a bitter taste of the knowledge they would end in goodbye. But this goodbye will hurt the most of all. And we both know it.

“Lucy, you know I can’t keep this up,” she says, her hands sliding to my neck. I inhale sharply, but my breath stops short like the air can’t physically get past the sob in my throat. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t have it in me.”

“I don’t think you tried hard enough,” I whisper, feeling a crack in my voice.

“You’re right. Because I knew I wasn’t going to win.” She brushes some strands of hair out of my face, cupping her fingers under my chin. “I would rather spend my last few months just like this, in these special moments with you, than in a hospital. You know I have to do things my way.”I know, I say in my head. And in true Josie fashion, she’s choosing to act like dying is her idea.I’m going to die, but not because cancer told me to. Classic.

“Well, then you should have made this decision sooner. We could have been living our best small town lives sewing shit and growing shit and—” I stop talking when Josie wipes a tear off my cheek.

“We have been living our best lives, honey,” she says with a laugh. “Every moment out in the sun. If I squint, I can pretend I’m on the coast of Nice instead of the depths of suburbia.” I let out a laugh, my nose stuffing with the water building in my eyes. “And you are going to continue to do so. You’re going to finish this book. Not for your boss or for me or to prove to your parents or society that you can. You’re going to do it for you.” She takes a breath, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m so proud of you, my Lucy Loo.”

Three weeks later, Josie is gone.

She does it dramatically and on her terms. She lays out in the sun, a smutty book in her hand, and closes her eyes. Part of me wishes she had better planning skills, because she would be the perfect person to have a living memorial for. She would have gotten a kick out of it. Instead, we go all out for her. After the funeral, we drink Bloody Marys and play the music too loudly. Any passerby might have thought we were having a pool party, but we were simply partying on the coast of France, just like Josie would have wished it. I cry more that day than I ever have in my life, knowing that Josie would be shaking her head at me the entire time.What’s the cry about?She would say.I’m in Heaven. The digs here are great.

I have a hard time getting back to work. Elle comes to my parents’ house to physically bring me back to the city. Because if I go back, then that means life has to return to normal. And my life can’t be normal without one of my favorite people in it. I can’t watch millions of people walk by me on the streets of New York, acting as if the entire world hasn’t just shifted on its axis when Josie’s soul left this plane. How could anything be normal anymore?

And yet I go. I go through the motions of everyday life, trying to convince myself that tomorrow will be better. And every night, I go to the roof of our building and watch the sunset, earlier and earlier with each passing day. I watch the sky change from blue to yellow, to orange, sometimes to purple and pink, and I think of a boy, hundreds of miles away, who might just be watching the same thing. And I think of my aunt, wondering if she can see the sunset where she is.

Josie lived her life to the fullest, and she loved how cliché that sounded. She loved to be the topic of conversation, especially disapproving conversation, in which people would scandalize her for chasing her dreams, working too much, spending too much money, smoking too much, and drinking even more. She said everyone was jealous of her. And she was right. We were.

With every day that passes without her, I become more jealous of my aunt’s ability to decide for herself—what she wanted, what she did, where she lived. I’m jealous of her ability not to give a flying fuck what anyone said about it.

I’m jealous because I can’t do the same.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It’s not until the end of August that I finally return to my book.

Life without Josie is quiet. There’s too much space for my thoughts to drift—to Liam, to a future without my wonderfully eccentric aunt, to the possibility that someone mightactuallybelieve my book has value, forcing me to confront my career. Writing feels impossible with a mind this still. The quiet amplifies every doubt, every worry, every stray thought clamoring for attention.

In the scene where I left off, the heroine wrestles with the decision to return home after weeks spent pouring herself into the screenplay for her film. She’s finally admitted that she loves the hero, but the reality of the distance between them looms large. And she isn’t prepared to risk her career, no matter how deep her feelings run, however much she might love small-town life.

It’s at this point that I realize that I’m not exactly sure how this book is going to end. In my outline and synopsis, I kind of left that as a “TBD” or a “TK” as we put on everything in publishing (and no one really knows why). I know the couple is going to get together in the end, but I’m not exactly settled on how that is going to happen.

In romance books, there are really only two options for an ending: happily ever after or happy for now. The first implies that the couple’s story is complete, and they will be together—married, with children, or a proposal, up to interpretation—forever. “Happy for now” means that the couple has overcome the great obstacle that threatened to tear them apart in the book. “Happy for now” leaves the opportunity for a sequel.

I’ve always thought of “happily ever after” as a big commitment, especially if the story includes some kind of instant love. I love romance, so much so that I’ve made a career out of it, but not every aspect of it is my favorite. I’ve never bought into the plots that have the couple fall in love within a matter of days. At the end of the book, they profess that they can’t live without each other, or they’d die for one another, when they haven’t even eaten a meal together.

Happily ever after also says a lot about the couple’s future. Someday we’ll be happy. We’ll be happy forever. Fifty years from now, we’ll find true happiness. And I just have one question to pose to Disney, Cinderella, and romance writers everywhere: what aboutnow? Why can’t our happiness focus on the here and now? Maybe we should say “screw the future” because, as corny as it sounds, it’s not promised. Maybe we should make “happily ever now” the new “happily ever after.”

I scroll to the first page of my document and type in all capitals:

HAPPILY EVER NOW

The next morning, I send the first 200 pages to Anne, with the subject line in the email reading, “Surprise.”

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