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It was fine. Okay, so maybe her life felt a little like a movie montage about a lonely spinster who did nothing but go to work, eat lunch by herself at her desk, and spend her evenings knitting in front of the TV with her cat—which wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, because Sally always tried to bite her yarn ends.
She’d finished Jonathan’s hat last week, but she obviously couldn’t give it to him, so she’d stuffed it in the bottom of her dresser and started a new pair of socks for herself. They didn’t follow any kind of pattern. She was using up all the leftover sock yarn from other projects—all the random, miscellaneous bits and pieces in all different colorways. She’d reach into her stash and grab the first thing that came to hand, knit until she got tired of it, and then switch to something else. They were the ugliest socks she’d ever seen. Messy and tragic, like Esther’s life.
“I hate this,” Penny said unhappily. “Drama stresses me out.”
Esther scowled at the Hallmark movie on her TV screen. “I’m not exactly a fan either.”
“We’re your friends too, and you’ll always be welcome. You can come back whenever you want.”
It was a nice sentiment, but Esther couldn’t imagine going back as long as Jinny was refusing to speak to her. It would be awful and uncomfortable for everyone. They didn’t deserve to be dragged into the middle of it.
“Promise you’ll call if you need anything,” Penny said.
“I will.” Hearing Penny’s voice drove home just how much Esther had missed the group. Vilma was like the mother figure she’d always wanted, and the others were like sisters. They were like a little family. The only family Esther had in LA. “I’ll be back eventually. Assuming the divorce isn’t permanent.”
“You’re not getting divorced,” Penny insisted. “You two will work it out.”
Esther wished she could believe that. She hadn’t expected the fight with Jinny to go on this long. It had already been a week and a half. She’d tried texting Jinny again on Monday as a test balloon, but it had gone unanswered, like the others.
She toyed with the idea of going over to Jinny’s apartment and seeing if she’d let her in. It was a trigger she might have to pull eventually, but for now it seemed like an endeavor with a high probability of rejection. She’d give her a few more days, and then she’d reevaluate.
Esther got off the phone with Penny and went back to watching her terrible Hallmark movie and knitting her ugly socks.
An hour later, there was a knock on her door.
Her heart leapt into her throat as Sally bolted for the bedroom. What if it was Jonathan? She couldn’t talk to him right now. Not in her pajamas. There was probably pizza sauce on her chin and she wasn’t wearing a bra.
She got up and peered through the peephole. There was no one there. Creepy. This was exactly how a lot of horror movies started. She waited, listening for any sounds of murderers skulking nearby. When she didn’t hear anything, she opened the door a crack.
There was a manila envelope lying on the doorstep with her name written on it in a familiar black Pilot gel pen scrawl.
Jonathan had left her something.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Her heart thudded in her chest as she stooped to retrieve the envelope. There was no sign of him. He must have hightailed it back into his apartment, so he wouldn’t have to face her.
She carried the envelope inside and closed the door. Inside it was a copy of Jonathan’s first script. American Dreamers. The love story he’d promised to show her when it was finished.
Esther sank down on the couch and flipped to the first page. The Hallmark movie she’d been watching faded into distant background noise as she pored over every word. Fascinated. Mesmerized. Stunned.
The more she read, the louder her pulse pounded in her ears.
It was about her. About them.
Jonathan had completely rewritten the female lead, Emily, and remade her in Esther’s image. Instead of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she was grounded, sarcastic, pragmatic, and a little closed off. Distrustful and averse to emotional attachments. She even had a degree in engineering and a disdain for good coffee.
Jonas, the male lead, was mostly unchanged. He was still loosely autobiographical, but with a lot of the character’s annoyingly quirky traits excised. Instead of a busker, he was a writer now, like Jonathan. He was less smug in this draft, and kinder. More vulnerable. He wore his heart on his sleeve, quick to love and unafraid to express it.
The whole story had been overhauled. For one thing, there actually was one now. Jonas and Emily still met the same way—only in an airport instead of a train station, like Esther had suggested—but there was more purpose to their interactions. In this new draft, Jonas fell head over heels for Emily in the first act, and spent the rest of the screenplay trying to convince her that love at first sight was real, despite Emily’s insistence that love was a fantasy. She even called it “a delusion caused by rising cortisol levels and depleted serotonin,” like Esther had.
A lot of the conversations in the script mirrored conversations she’d had with Jonathan. It was almost like reading a diary of their friendship.
In the last act, Jonas begged Emily to postpone her trip and stay one more day. If she’d just give him one more day, he told her, he could prove they were meant to be together. She just needed to take a chance on him. Open herself up to the possibility of love.
It ended on a cliffhanger, just before Emily—clearly torn—made her decision. You didn’t know whether or not she was going to say yes.
The words blurred before Esther’s eyes as she stared at the page. Jonathan was using this script to tell her how he felt about her. Every page, every word, was about them. He was asking her to give them a chance.
