Chapter 39. Seth
I will spare you an accounting of what the last month of my life has been like. Let’s just say when I got to Nashville, I cried so hard I threw up.
Don’t feel bad; it’s been weirdly galvanizing.
The silver lining to getting my heart put through a garbage disposal is that I’ve been converted to Molly’s way of thinking: I now know, once and for all, there is not a woman waiting to make my life perfect and meaningful. I can’t count on another person to do that. I can only count on myself.
So I’m opening my own firm.
I’ve moved quickly. I’ve already lined up two founding copartners and arranged the financing. We’ve hired an office manager, and with his help, we’ll be up and running by March. At that point I’ll resign from my firm and take my clients with me.
If that seems devious, well, maybe Molly was right to distrust divorce lawyers.
At least I can console myself by giving back to my community.
My nonprofit is expanding. I’ve been working closely with Becky Anatolian and some law school friends who now work in New York to get a new branch up and running there, staffed by Columbia and NYU law students. Becky’s been such a rock star as a volunteer that we asked her to lead the effort to open the new office.
I’m waiting for an email from her regarding a location in Brooklyn she just went to look at with our Realtor.
I’m about to leave my office for the airport—I’m visiting my parents in Florida for New Year’s, to avoid the despair of spending it alone—when Becky’s address pops up in my inbox.
From: [email protected]
Date: Thurs, Dec 30, 2021 at 10:41am
Subject: As requested…
Hey Molly! Hope you are having a good time in Florida! I’m attaching the proofed screenplay. Let me know if you need anything else.—Becks
Attached is a file called BLNTFinal_BAedits.FDR.
Obviously, this email was not meant for me.
Obviously, it was meant for someone named Molly.
Obviously, the Molly in question is Molly Marks.
Becky must have entered my email address accidentally when she sent this.
I know it’s wrong to open something that isn’t meant for you. I should let Becky know she sent it to the wrong person and delete the email.
But, yeah… I’m not doing that.
I forgive myself under the circumstances and click the attachment.
My computer doesn’t recognize the file.
Fuck.
I google .FDR extensions and figure out that this is a screenplay written in a software program called Final Draft, which I don’t have.
My assistant pokes her head in the door. “Your car is waiting. You should probably leave now if you don’t want to be late for your flight. Google Maps says the traffic is bad.”
“Okay, thanks, Pattie,” I say, trying not to reveal that I am in a state of emotional crisis.
I grab my suitcase and rush downstairs to my car.
“O’Hare?” the driver asks.
“Yeah,” I say, buckling up.
As soon as the car starts moving, I buy the Final Draft app and reopen Becky’s email.
When I click on the attached file, a screenplay pops up.
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
BY MOLLY MARKS
INT. WHITE TENT - NIGHT
NINA MACLEAN (mid-30s, world-weary) is sitting alone at a banquet table in a white tent on a beach. It’s decorated with over-the-top tropical decor: think fake palm trees and baskets of flip-flops. Above it all is a sign:WELCOME SEA VIEW HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 2003!!!
FORMER CLASSMATES are on the dance floor grinding to a late 1990s rap song.
COLE HESS (mid-30s, charming) makes his way toward Nina from behind.
Nina flags down a waiter just as Cole approaches.
NINA
(TO THE WAITER)
Another glass of prosecco, please.
COLE
(TO THE WAITER)
Make that a Negroni, with an extra splash of Campari. Nina likes things bitter.
Nina and Cole lock eyes. These two have history. He sits down in an empty chair next to her.
COLE
How have you been since you broke my heart fifteen years ago? Still out there drowning kittens and making toddlers cry?
NINA
Not to mention embezzling retirement funds from the elderly.
COLE
Weird, given you always sucked at math.
NINA
Funny. Actually, I write screenplays. Rom-coms.
Cole bursts out laughing.
COLE
That’s a bit ironic, don’t you think? You always hated anything that had to do with love. I should know.
NINA
I always liked money. And they pay well. What do you do?
COLE
I’m an attorney. Family law.
NINA
Oh my God. You’re a divorce lawyer?
Holy shit.
Is this about us? Did Molly write a screenplay about us?
This is what she’s been doing while I wake up in the night unable to breathe? Turning our love into punch lines?
I’m shocked she’s able to keep hurting me, given how wretched I already feel, but I shouldn’t be; no one was ever able to twist the knife like Molly Marks.
I should stop reading this out of self-preservation, but I can’t bring myself to.
I’m rapt as Nina and Cole start flirting and arguing over who knows more about love. They pick five couples to bet on, including themselves.
My car reaches the airport and I force myself to stop reading long enough to get through security. At the gate, I get in trouble for staring at my phone and holding up the priority boarding line.
I can’t help it. I see words we’ve said to each other on the page, verbatim. You make me astonishingly happy, he tells her. You’ll find the love of your life, and she’ll be a very lucky woman, she tells him. And my heart goes into hummingbird mode remembering how it felt to say and hear these things. Knowing these moments are burned into Molly’s memory the same way they’re burned into mine.
My anger has sharpened into something more complex. This bittersweet feeling of resentment and nostalgia and joy, all at once.
I rip through Act II, and just like me and Molly, Nina and Cole run into each other at a baseball game and have a great time. But at the end of the night, when she tries to kiss him, he tells her he’s in a relationship.
She acts cool, but as soon as he leaves, she sobs with her head against the steering wheel of her car in the parking lot, surrounded by raucous tailgaters lighting streamers and setting off firecrackers so loud that her windows shake.
I think of that day in Molly’s car, after the baby shower. Her face when I said I was seeing someone. I knew she was disappointed. I didn’t know she was crushed.
But it’s here: she was crushed. She never mentioned that to me. I guess she wouldn’t have. She doesn’t like to share her vulnerabilities.
Instead, she writes them into her characters.
And the character she wrote? Nina? She’s pining. And Cole doesn’t see it. He gets engaged to the wrong woman, and he doesn’t see it. He “takes time to heal” when that relationship ends, even though Nina is right there—and he still doesn’t see it.
I always felt like I was the one doing the chasing. But I realize, reading this, that Molly was chasing me too. That I hurt her, deeply, in ways I couldn’t help any more than she could have helped hurting me.
That she may have broken us up when I asked her to marry me—but she also waited for me. For years.
It makes me want to gather her in my arms and tell her I’m sorry for being so dense. For making her wait for what she could sense was right all along.
I keep reading. Cole and Nina run into each other at a friend’s wedding. They’re both finally single. They fall for each other with all the tenderness and passion that we did.
And then, standing on a cliff in the rain as they’re watching for whales, Cole gets down on one knee and proposes.
He tells Nina she’s his soul mate.
I clench.
Molly writes rom-coms, but I have a terrible feeling this isn’t one. That it’s what she calls a “rom-traum”—the twist on the genre, where the love story is doomed.
Don’t do it,I mentally plead with her. Don’t make them suffer like we have.
But in my heart, I know what’s coming.
Nina says she doesn’t believe in soul mates.
She leaves Cole in Maine.
I frantically scroll down, praying what comes next is not the words THE END.
There are still fifteen pages left in the script.
I’m dying.
We see Nina mourn. I fucked up, she tells her best friend. But I don’t deserve another chance.
TELL HIM, I want to yell at her as I read this. JUST TELL HIM.
There are four pages left, and I can barely breathe.
We switch to Cole’s POV. He and his best friend are making plans to attend their twentieth high school reunion. Is Nina coming? the friend asks. No, Cole says. She hates this kind of thing. And she won’t want to see me.
And he’s right. When they arrive, she’s not there.
Despite knowing she wouldn’t be, Cole is flattened. But just as he’s walking out, someone taps the microphone on the stage.
It’s Nina, standing up there. And she’s looking right at him.
Five years ago,she tells the crowd, I did something really stupid. I told Cole that true love was a fairy tale. That soul mates were bullshit made up by the Hallmark Industrial Complex. We made a bet over it, in fact. If he wins, I have to admit that happily ever afters are real. And if I win, he has to admit that true love is a fantasy—a pit stop along the road to heartbreak.
Well, I’m here to say that maybe neither of us was right. Relationships carry joy and pain. Sometimes big loves fade. Sometimes rocky ones recover. Sometimes life brings unexpected twists. All we can count on is cherishing what we have, and trying like hell to be good to each other.
All we can do is be brave enough to believe in love, and to fight for it.
Cole, I know I messed up. I know I was cowardly, and I hurt you. But this is me, fighting for you. And if you’ll give me another chance, I’ll fight for our happily ever after for the rest of our lives.
He doesn’t even need to think. He runs across the room, dodging gawking classmates, and leaps onto the stage.
They kiss like their lives depend on it.
Sorry you didn’t win the bet, he whispers.
I don’t care about the bet, she says. I only care about you.
He swings her around as the classmates all cheer for them.
THE END
By now I am full-on weeping. The man next to me ignores this for a few minutes and then finally looks over at me.
“You okay, dude? Need a whiskey or something?”
I shake my head.
“Sorry,” I sniffle. “I’m fine. Just really happy.”
And I am.
Because Molly had it in her to write this.
Our happy ending.
But I’m also crying because this screenplay breaks my heart all over again. It proves that this woman knows in precise emotional detail what caused our relationship to collapse. She sees both the ways we have loved each other, and the ways we have failed each other. She gets that neither of us was right about love—her version pessimistic to the point of nihilism, mine optimistic to the point of parody. And rather than talking this out with me, and trying to make our relationship work, she wrote a perfect movie about it.
This script proves that she pursued me, loved me, grieved me. And yeah, it’s an idealized version of us, with a fairy-tale ending that is too pat and tidy to stand up to real life. And yeah, like she’s always saying, the story ends at the good part, at the peak of their happiness.
But I would watch the hell out of the sequel, when things get messy, and they work through it. I want the part where they bicker over her never putting the dishes away and his obsession with vacuuming. When they fart in front of each other and talk openly about pooping. When they’re sleep-deprived and shaky because they have a colicky baby, or bereft over the decline of a parent. I want to watch them live out the pleasure and sadness and tedium and comfort and joy of a partnered existence.
Because I never needed the rom-com part of our relationship.
I was living for the part you don’t freeze in amber. The love and the pain and the mess.
And instead, I’m getting this. The most profound emotions of my life, packaged into commercialized fiction. The sweet things I did, amped up into swoony details to make you fall vicariously in love with the dude in the movie. Our most tender moments, turned into heart-clenching dialogue. Our foibles, simplified into predictable character flaws that we’ll overcome in 110 minutes.
Part of me is so hurt that this is what she chose to do with our love story. Idealizing it instead of trying to fix it. Selling it instead of living it out. That sliver of me is tempted to simmer in my resentment until this movie comes out in three years, and then write an aggrieved open letter calling her out for monetizing my pain behind my back. Sue her for exploiting my life rights without my permission. Get her back for how much losing her cost me.
But that’s not how I’m built.
In my heart I think there’s something at work here more important than ambition or money. I think writing this script is how Molly is trying to heal.
I know, in my soul, that we love each other in a way I’ve never experienced, and doubt I’ll ever experience again.
Our love wasn’t a romantic comedy.
I didn’t expect it to be.
All I ever wanted was her.
But what am I supposed to do now? Reach out, just to get rejected again? Receive another lecture on how I don’t understand that fiction is fake?
As much as I want to storm her door and demand that she try again, I can’t be the one on my knees.
Not again.
But I hope.
I hope, and hope, and hope.