It took exactly four weeks to get our DNA results, and by then I’d been back in Pasadena for three and half of them. I’d left Gaitlin’s after a few days when the Realtor called with a decent offer on my mother’s house, which I’d promptly accepted. She’d offered to help me hire someone to come in and pack everything away into storage until I was finished filming, but I’d told her that wouldn’t be necessary. That I would come back to Pasadena and go through my mother’s things myself.
A few weeks later, I had just finished going through my mother’s closet when I saw the 23andMe email hit my inbox and decided I would ignore it for a little while.
But then it was promptly followed up by a text from Gaitlin that simply said: told ya. A weird sense of relief flooded my body, and I sat down on the master bathroom floor and opened up the email and started to cry. Gaitlin was definitely my father. He was right. Everything I’d ever known wasn’t a lie. Gloria was wrong.
I felt a smug sort of satisfaction that maybe my quitting the film, quitting Will and fleeing Washington had all been justified. But then here I was, literally knee-deep in thirty years of my mother’s junk, and maybe winning would’ve looked something more like staying on the film, telling Gloria to fuck off and taking the Realtor up on her offer to hire someone to put all this into storage?
Liza had told me that Gloria’s part was quickly recast after I left—Celeste Templeton of all people. And why not? Gloria loved Seattle Med. Celeste was a real up-and-comer. I knew they were on a break from filming for the summer so Celeste had the time. And I knew I wasn’t really allowed to care since I was the one who’d walked away from the role to begin with. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about finding her in my bed with Jase. About her more than likely meeting Will on set. It felt like Gloria had orchestrated it all on purpose to get back at me for some sin I still didn’t even understand. And that thought alone made me want to scream.
But what was done was done. I had quit. I was here. And most importantly, now I knew for sure that Gloria was out of her mind. That I had made the right decision to play no part in her film.
“No regrets,” I said to my mother’s elderly orange tabby, Sebastian, who walked across the bathroom floor, rubbing against my legs. “Right, kitty?”
Sebastian already looked pissed that I had his entire home in upheaval, that I had taken away all his piles, the clothes in my mother’s closet and most of his furniture. He had the kind of look on his face now that made me think he was not-so-secretly plotting my murder while I slept at night. But I stroked his chin, and then he rubbed against my hand with his head.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “You’re coming with me to Santa Monica.” I had a cute little house under contract, not too far from the beach, that I would close on in a few weeks. Sebastian had spent his whole life with my mother—she’d adopted him as a replacement for me after I’d left for college—and even though I wasn’t really a cat person I couldn’t bear the thought of sending him to a shelter. “We’re moving somewhere very nice,” I assured him.
But Sebastian had already given up on me and left to jump up on the high empty shelf of my mother’s closet. If I stopped to think about it, I might’ve been sad that I’d downgraded my closest living breathing companion to my mother’s elderly cat. But I didn’t stop to think. I grabbed another box and walked toward my mother’s office.
I had saved this room for last. And not because it contained years’ worth of documents (like tax returns) that I knew I would have to spend an enormous amount of time shredding. But because the walls in here were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves contained rows and rows of Gloria Diamond books. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at them yet, much less take them off the shelves and decide whether to bring them to Santa Monica with me, donate them or throw them in the trash. That last option felt particularly harsh and, yet, also somewhat deserved for how Gloria had treated me.
But now I’d finished most of the rest of the house, and armed with real proof that Gloria was wrong about my father, I walked into my mother’s office, straight toward the shelves. I stopped there for a moment and stared at all the pink and purple spines. How had my mother read all these, collected all these, and never once mentioned her friendship with Gloria? I supposed it had something to do with whatever happened many years ago to tear them apart, or maybe whatever happened that led Gloria to believe that Max was my father. Gloria loved Max. My mother once dated Max, according to Gaitlin. It felt both cliché and disappointing that they had probably ended their friendship over a man.
I sighed and started taking the books off the shelves. I picked up my favorite first, Love at the End of the World. I had always loved books almost as much as I’d loved movies, and I could remember with perfect accuracy where I had been, how I had been feeling when I first read, or watched, something I particularly loved. This book had gone with me on a long flight from LAX to Newark, a summer trip to Gaitlin’s. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, the summer before Melody was born. I still remembered holding this book in my hand as I stepped off the plane and was confronted with Courtney’s enormous belly. Knowing she was pregnant and seeing her actually pregnant had been two entirely different things, and I’d clutched the book, this beautiful postapocalyptic love story, to my chest as I’d wandered through the terminal, staring at Courtney’s giant belly and feeling a little like my own world was about to be upended.
I flipped through the book again, remembering how much I loved the very first line: Sometimes the end of everything sneaks up on you when you least expect it. For some reason, now, though, I thought about Will. I thought about my strange memory of being trapped inside a pantry with him, and of him helping me in the snow. I thought about the way his face looked when I told him I wanted him to leave. A month later, Will probably wasn’t dwelling on what had happened between us. In fact, he had probably already forgotten all about me.
I sighed and put the copy of the book down on my mother’s desk. Maybe this one I would keep and take with me to Santa Monica, but the rest I decided I would throw in a box and stick them in the pile for Goodwill with the majority of my mother’s clothes. I swept them off one of the shelves with one abrupt motion of my hand and felt the smallest sense of satisfaction at the sound of them cascading roughly onto the tile floor.
But then I noticed something stuck in the back of the completely empty shelf. A red envelope. It was hard and square—containing a card of some sort. I pulled it out of the shelf—it was sealed shut. And when I turned it over, there was one word written on the front: Mare.