Page 73 of It's a Love Story

“You’ve been fostering that story as long as I’ve known you, tending to it like a pet. It controls so many things about your life, and I have a feeling it’s torpedoed your chance of love. And the only reason that story has this power is because you keep it chained up inside. You’ve got to talk to your mom, stop all this bullshit. I bet the truth about your dad’s leaving is more complicated than you not being the world’s most compelling five-year-old.”

I rest my head on her shoulder because I really am so, so tired. Tired from travel, tired from crying. I’m tired from staying up all night with Dan.

“I don’t know how to talk to my mom about this. I feel like it would break something between us. It terrifies me.”

“I know.”

“I blew up at Dan.”

Clem gives me a tight-lipped look like she’s trying not to say something.

“What,” I say.

“The movie was a long shot. But the Dan thing sounded real. What did he do?”

“Told me to face the truth.” I let out a hard laugh.

She raises her eyebrows but has the grace not to say anything.

“I hold on to a lot of shame,” I say. “Like it sneaks up on me.”

“Yes, you hold on to it really tight, like it’s your identity.”

I feel that sentence right in my heart, like a sharp, quick fist.

“In other news, Mom’s in love again, so.” I take a sip of hot soup.

“Sometimes love is totally illogical.”

“Yeah,” I say. I don’t say more because I don’t want to hear the sound of my voice talking about how it was with Dan, how relaxed I got and how happy I felt just pedaling a bike by his side. I could be funny or quiet or bad at water- colors, and it was all the same to him. And I think about my Manifest a Solid Partner project and all the guys who I just couldn’t get into a natural rhythm with. It wasn’t necessarily something wrong between us—those guys never even met me. They all felt like cardboard because I was cardboard with them.

“There’s a version of me that’s better than the version of me that I show the world,” I say after a while.

“It’s the version I see,” says Clem. “The first time we met, remember we couldn’t stop laughing? I saw who you were right away. And now, I mean, you put on your costume and get in your Lexus and chase a life that you think is going to make everything okay. And the truth is that one day the hostess at the Ivy is going to know who you are, maybe she’ll even escort you to Scorsese’s table, and it’s still not going to change the fact that your dad left.” She puts her arm around me and pulls me close. We’re quiet for a while and watch the fireflies. There’s a palm tree in the backyard of the house across the street. It towers over the neighborhood on its impossibly thin trunk, the secret of its deep, deep roots below the ground.

“Do you want to talk about Dan?” she asks after a while. “The whole week feels like a dream now. The kind you wake up from and slam your eyes shut so you can go back again.”

“So you’re going to go back? It all sounded pretty great.”

“I was myself with him, like it was so easy. I just said the first thing that popped into my head. And I was funny. For some reason, that was okay.” I take a sip of my hot soup. Clem’s watching me because she knows there’s more. “But there’s so much of me that’s broken. It’s a matter of time before he sees all that and bolts anyway.”

Clem gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Ah, your favorite story,” she says.

CHAPTER 33

MONDAYMORNINGARRIVESINAMOREPAINFULway than it usually does. It’s six a.m. and I’ve barely slept. I am raw. Raw and empty. I’ve scheduled a meeting with Nathan for noon and I plan to come clean. I have both Dan and Clem in my head telling me I need to face things head-on. I’m not ready to face everything, but this one is unavoidable. I have lost so much in the past few days; I cannot lose my job too. I’ve run through the story a bunch of different ways, but the only one I can easily tell is the truth:I lied. I totally made it up.

“There she is,” Nathan says when I’ve been announced. “Come, sit. Tell me everything.”

I stop before I sit, just to feel this. It’s what I’ve been hoping for all along. Nathan thinks I’ve caught a tiger, that I’ve jumped through the hoops to make the big thing. Nathan is finally looking at me like I’m a player. And I realize that Clem is right. It changes nothing. I am not better or worth more in these few minutes that Nathan believes this.

“Everything,” I say and take the seat across from his desk. “Everything would really be a lot.”

He laughs. “Tell me about Quinlan.”

“I saw him and we spoke about the movie.” I reach down to arrange my skirt over my knees in that way I do to buy time, and I see that I am in jeans. “I’m in jeans,” I say out loud. “What a weird thing for me to do.”

“Are you all right?” Nathan asks.

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