When Lilly gets downstairs two mornings later she finds Colin sitting at the kitchen island in a pair of glasses that are almost certainly not prescription, a thick stack of pages on the table in front of him. “Cugina!” he greets her. “What’s up?”
“Not much.” She glances at his manuscript as she heads for the coffee maker; then, actively feeling all the blood drain out of her body, she glances at it again. “Is that—” she asks, then finds she sincerely cannot make herself finish the sentence.
Colin takes care of it for her: “Your screenplay!” he reports happily. “I’m almost done.”
Lilly opens her mouth, then closes it. Tries one more time. “Where did you—”
“Oh, your mom gave it to me,” he confesses. “She said you didn’t want to take advantage of our relationship, which I think is really decent of you. But seriously, you should have just asked me. You know I’m always glad to help you out.”
“Help me out?”
Colin smiles. “It’s honestly not bad,” he says, tapping the pages with one finger. A signet pinky ring glints in the warm morning light. “A tiny bit self-indulgent, maybe. A little sure of its own cleverness. But the love story, all that stuff about her sister? That’s good work.” He takes a swig of his kombucha. “I’d love to mentor you.”
“Mentor me?” Lilly echoes. It feels like it’s possible they’ll be here all day, her helplessly parroting everything he says until finally her head explodes and they have to call in one of those crime scene cleanup companies to scrape her gray matter off the ceiling.
“Why not?” Colin asks mildly. “I mean, let’s be real, people ask me all the time, and I always say no because frankly it’s a giant drain on my creative resources, but we’re family, right?”
“Allegedly,” Lilly murmurs.
“You could send me pages every few weeks,” he suggests, “and I’d mark them up for you. Offer feedback, you know. Speaking of which, can I just say one more thing?”
Can I stop you? Lilly doesn’t reply—not that it matters, since Colin forges right on ahead without waiting for her to answer. “And really, this isn’t a comment on the quality of the work product. But it kind of feels like you maybe . . . don’t care about this that much.”
Lilly feels her whole skeleton straighten up, like someone injected her bones with titanium. “What does that mean?” she asks, her voice a full octave higher than normal. Who the fuck does he think he is, sitting here in her house and presuming to tell her—
“I’m not saying it as a knock on you,” he clarifies quickly, and the worst part is that it doesn’t actually seem like he is. He actually just seems . . . curious. “And I don’t mean writing. You obviously care about writing. I just mean, like, this particular story.”
“I care about it,” Lilly tells him, but even as she’s saying the words she knows they’re not entirely true. After all, wasn’t she just thinking the same thing in the privacy of her bedroom? Hasn’t the other thing—the real thing—been scratching at her door? “I care about it plenty.”
“Okay,” Colin says, and his voice is so gentle she immediately wants to drown them both in the shallow end of the pool. “Fair enough. You’d know better than I would. But you’re a talented writer, Lilly. So if there’s something you’d rather be writing, and it kind of seems from what I’ve read here that maybe there is, I guess I’m just saying . . . I think you should write it.”
“Well,” Lilly manages. Her face feels like it’s on fire. “I will definitely keep that in mind.”
She marches back inside and up the stairs to her mother’s bedroom, where Cinta is lying in bed drinking coffee and watching Turner Classic Movies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it’s ten thirty in the morning. “You gave Colin my screenplay?” she demands.
“I did!” her mother exclaims, setting her cup down on the nightstand and clapping her hands delightedly. “Did he talk to you about it?”
“How did you even get my screenplay?” she asks. Her mother can barely log in to her email; back when the show was airing she briefly ran her own Instagram account, but she kept accidentally posting badly lit selfies taken at unflattering up-angles and offensive memes she didn’t actually understand, so finally Olivia took her phone and changed the password.
“Mari helped me,” Cinta says now, her voice airy. “It was in the cloud.”
“I can’t believe you,” Lilly says. “Not only to just invade my privacy like that—that part actually doesn’t surprise me that much, I have to say—but to turn the thing over to Colin, of all people—”
Cinta’s mouth drops open. “Colin is an Academy Award nominee who knows a lot of influential people!”
“Colin is a total blowhard!” Lilly counters.
“I thought you’d be grateful.”
“Why would I be grateful?”
“I thought you were too shy to ask him yourself!”
“When have I ever, in my entire life, been too shy to do anything I wanted to do?”
There’s a moment of recognition on her mother’s face then, like possibly that particular wrinkle hadn’t occurred to her. Still, “I was trying to help you,” she argues. “You’ve been moping around this house doing a fat lot of nothing ever since Joe died. If you’re going to spend your most beautiful years slouched over your computer giving yourself wrinkles and a hunchback, at least you ought to get something for it.”
Lilly opens her mouth, closes it again. She has no idea where to start. “This has nothing to do with Joe,” she finally says.
“Doesn’t it?” her mother asks archly, turning her attention back to the television. “You’re in my way,” she announces, flapping her hand in a way that indicates Lilly should move over. After a moment, Lilly does.
* * *
She and Nick go for a walk in Topanga Canyon the following day, wandering the rocky trails while the mockingbirds call to each other in the trees high above them, the smell of grass and salt and sunshine thick in the air. They’ve seen each other a couple of times since that night at the bar, long rambles through the West Hollywood farmer’s market and the quiet, leafy neighborhoods of Pasadena, iced coffees sweating pleasantly in their hands. He’s easy to talk to, full of jokes and good humor and stories that might or might not be wholly accurate. Lilly finds she actually likes him quite a lot.
“The twisted part,” she says now, pulling Nick out of the way as a woman with two enormous poodles prances by in the opposite direction, “is that she really did think she was helping me.”
“I mean.” Nick glances at her sidelong, full lips quirking. “She kind of was, wasn’t she?”
“What?” Lilly whirls on him. “No!”
“Really?” He shrugs. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hear you, she went behind your back and you hate him and he’s a stuck-up loser and all of that.”
“He is a turd,” Lilly says witheringly.
“Noted,” Nick agrees. “Total turd. But so much of being successful in this town is about knowing the right people, isn’t it? And it seems like if you want to be a screenwriter, then your cousin’s not a bad guy to, like . . . know.”
Lilly bites her lip. He’s got a point, obviously. And it’s not like she hasn’t thought about it; in fact, she spent the last twenty-four hours stewing, loudly, until even Junie reached the limits of her patience and told her she had to let it go. But what Lilly doesn’t know how to explain—to Nick, or to her family, or to anyone else—is that accepting help from Colin is as good as acknowledging she isn’t talented enough to make it happen. It’s like admitting she’s been kidding herself this whole time, that maybe she really will only ever get by on luck and connections. That everything everyone ever said about her is true.
“No, of course,” she says finally—hoping she sounds like the kind of person who doesn’t take any of this too seriously, who hasn’t built the entire scaffolding of her identity on a cheerful delusion. “You’re right.”
“But you’re definitely not going to do it.”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely not.”
Nick laughs at that—loud and full-throated, throwing his head back. “A woman who knows her own mind,” he says. “I can appreciate that.”
They walk for a while longer without saying anything; the back of his hand brushes hers. He’s wearing what Lilly assumes are his gym clothes, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out and a New York Rangers hat turned backward. She can only imagine what Will Darcy would say about a grown man walking around in public wearing a backward hat like an extra in a Julia Stiles vehicle from the early aughts, which is only one of a great many reasons why it’s a good thing she doesn’t care what Will Darcy thinks.
“Anyway,” Lilly says finally, “who knows. Maybe I’ll do that dating show after all, let a dozen guys beat the shit out of each other with those big foam Q-Tips for the pleasure of my company.”
“Now that I would like to see.”
“I’m sure you would.” Their shoulders bump, just casual, and she feels the contact sing all down her arm. “What about you?” she asks. “What do you want to do?”
Nick stops walking for a moment, tilting his head to the side. “Like, when I grow up?”
Lilly feels herself blanch. “I—no,” she amends quickly, feeling her face flush. Big talk, she thinks with no small amount of shame, from a woman who’s never had a proper job. “That sounded terrible. I didn’t mean—”
“A little bit you did,” he says, but he’s grinning. “I don’t know.” They’ve reached an overlook and he sits down on a large, flat boulder, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “I guess I’m so used to scraping a living together that I’ve never really had that much time to think about it. Like, I’m grateful to be out here where the weather is good and I meet interesting people. I don’t know that I have much of a plan other than that.”
Lilly raises her eyebrows—unsure of whether or not to take him at face value, if maybe he’s protecting his dreams from her in return. “How very Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-Titanic of you,” she teases. “And that, I meant exactly how it sounded.”
Nick laughs. “Screw you.” He reaches for her hand, pulling her down onto the rock beside him. “You want me to fight eleven other guys first?” he asks her quietly, then doesn’t bother to wait for an answer before he presses his mouth against hers.
* * *
When she gets back to the house she finds her family in the dining room in the middle of a séance—at least, that’s what it looks like, Cinta and Kit and Olivia all sitting sullenly in the dark. “What’s wrong?” Lilly asks, frowning out the window. There’s an unfamiliar sound and it takes her a moment to realize it’s silence, no low humming drone of the A/C. “Did we lose power?”
“Something like that.” Olivia’s voice is ominous.
“It is possible,” their mother says crisply, “that we are a tiny bit behind on the bills.”
“Did anyone call the company?” Lilly asks, three blank, cranky faces staring back at her. “Does anyone even know the name of the company?”
In the end it’s Lilly who does it, crossing her fingers as she recites her credit card number to the bored-sounding customer service attendant. The lights flicker on, then off, then back on again. Lilly holds her breath.