Page 95 of Happy After All

“She doesn’t let herself. It’s self-protection.”

“Seems valid.”

“It is, but ... she’s protecting herself from happiness too. Of course, she’ll have to have a dark night of the soul before she realizes that. My fictional heroine, if I were writing the story.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Right, so she has to lose him. She has to lose everything so she can see that’s the cost of holding on to fear.”

“Why?”

“See, this is why I do think romance novels are realistic, Nathan. Things just happen in a different order. In real life we have a spate of issues, and we don’t know where they all come from. But they always show up. We date the same people who are the same kind of wrong, we fall into the same bad patterns with work, with personal habits. We fail our friends in the same ways, and we have the same fights with our significant other. Over and over again. Each and every time we have to hit these mini crises, and if we want to move past them, we have to drain a little poison out of the wound. A little bit each time, and next time maybe we won’t fall as hard.”

I take a deep breath. “In romance you drain the poison out. In one big cathartic fight. One catastrophic loss. The loss of the person who showed you that you needed to heal, and you have to let the poison go to be happy. It’s the same process. It just takes a little more time.”

We look at each other, and I can feel the truth of our own wounds between us. We both know why people don’t just do that. It hurts too much.

It’s the same reason Elise won’t drop her guard and give herself what she wants. The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.

“I’m not writing it, though,” I say. “Elise really went through it with her ex. I think it’s all complicated when you have a child.”

“I can see that.”

Neither of us really knows, though. Because I know what it’s like to love a child, but I never got the opportunity to take care of that child. At least outside of my body.

He loved his wife. He still does—I can see that. Though it’s a different kind of love. One that’s about partnership more than simply caring for another person. Though, then I realize that of course hedidtake care of her.

My breath leaves my body in a gust.

You say vows to somebody when you marry them. In sickness and in health. He did that. He fulfilled his marriage vows. Maybe that’s whythere’s a strange sort of finality to so many things he says. Maybe that’s why when he says things like life is too short, he doesn’t mean himself. In some ways, I wonder if he feels like he’s done. He ran the race. He completed the task.

Why would he ever want to do it again?

It’s not a wound so much as a sense of completion.

It isn’t really as sad or hopeless a realization as I might’ve thought.

I’m standing here staring at a very good man. One I would never want to ask more of. One I would never want to ask to sacrifice himself like that ever again.

“How did you meetChristopher Weaver?” he asks me, saying Chris’s name like it’s consequential. I’m actually kind of glad he did ask. I can’t pretend that Chris isn’t something I’m going to have to deal with.

Especially since he’s acting as our moderator.

I can’t pretend that he wasn’t part of my life for all those years.

“When I moved to LA, I had a roommate. She was taking writing and acting gigs. Chris is just an actor. I mean, not just. I mean only. They ended up at a lot of the same table reads and things. Sometimes they made it into commercials or movies together, sometimes not. She got to know him, and they had a little bit of a friend group. I got brought into it. It was nice meeting somebody who was in the same industry because he understood how difficult it was. But we weren’t competing with each other.”

“What made you decide to write for TV?”

“I grew up just a few hours away from Hollywood. We did a class field trip to this studio. We went to a writers’ room. I’ve always loved books. Movies.” I gesture to the screen. “I love stories. Growing up ... I was really lonely. My house was just a desperately sad place to be. I have a mother who is deeply uninterested in me. Books, movies, TV shows, they gave me a chance to live a different life. A different reality. If I watched a sitcom, it was like being part of the kind of family that I didn’t have. Sometimes even watching dysfunctional families helped because I could imagine myself navigating those situations. I couldthink of myself as a character when my mom was being ridiculous. When she didn’t come to my Christmas pageant or something. It was a way to deal with it. To imagine I was in an emotional Christmas special when I looked out in the crowd and saw an empty chair instead of my mother. Or my father. Though, he lived an hour away so ...”

I was always thinking of myself in stories. Now I think of how I’d write someone else in them.

“He knew how your mom treated you,” Nathan says.

“Yes. He did. It’s ... It’s complicated. They got divorced when I was really little, and my mom hated him. He left her, and he found another woman suspiciously soon after who it turns out is the love of his life. He’s still with her all these years later. My dad loves me, but I’m a complication. A piece of his old life.”

“You’re not a complication,” Nathan says, his expression suddenly grave. “That’s the most absurd thing, Amelia. Your parents should not treat you like a complication.”

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