“Look,” I sigh. “I really only came here to ask you one thing.I need you to not write about me anymore. It’s been …” I fight to keep my voice even, struggling against the knot in my throat. “It’s been really hard. And I need to go back to my own life. Myreallife.”
She nods at me, her mouth lifting in a compassionate smile. “Consider it done.” She leans in conspiratorially and adds, “I’m actually planning on scrapping the whole thing. I got a bit ahead of myself in terms of publicity, but in the end, the book wasn’t really me. Just needed to get it out of my system, I think.”
I blink at her, not sure how to feel. Just like that, our story will never be told. I’ll never get to read it.
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I already know it by heart.
“Well … good, then,” I say. “I’m glad you got it out.”
She gives me a deep nod, almost a bow. I feel hollow. I have nothing more to say, and I’m very ready to not have Anna Matthews looming over my life anymore. So I turn to leave, hoping that someday I’ll be able to get the story and all its painful details out of my system just like she did.
And simultaneously dreading the day I no longer feel its hold on me, when it fades away like the memory of a dream.
With a knife twist in my heart, I remember something and stop.
“Grant says thank you, by the way,” I say over my shoulder.
I make it to the door, about to step back into my actual life, when I hear her voice.
“Who’s Grant?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Istop dead, gripping the door handle, facing the passersby on the street outside. The story is over, and my life is my own again, and yet time doesn’t seem to be moving. My heart feels like it’s in a slingshot, bracing to be flung out of my body.
I turn to face Anna, who’s watching me in distant confusion.
“Grant,” I say again.
Her face remains blank.
“Grant Hoffman.”
She frowns and shakes her head like I am ringing zero bells here.
“The love interest,” I finally say, though it feels so wrong reducing him to that title now.
She gives a confounded chortle, only now looking at me like I’m crazy. “There was no love interest,” she says. “That was the point. It was my cynical postdivorce book; I just wanted to write this girl who got burned by romance and took her sweet revenge.”
Everything is whirring around me. I shake my head. “No,Grant,” I say, as if maybe she didn’t hear me properly the first two or three or four times. “He was in the Uber I stole.”
“The driver?”
“No!” I say, frustration clawing at me. “The passenger. I took him to Steph’s beach house. He killed Jack!”
“There was no passenger,” she says. “Andyoukilled Jack.”
My mind cannonballs back to the Gifter.One hundred percent adherence to the plot is unlikely.I feel dizzy, struggling to make sense of this. Fighting the urge to hope.
No.Grant was too big a part of this story to be in it by accident. In many ways hewasthe story, for me.
“But all the tropes were there,” I argue. “What about Lovers’ Weekend at the inn? There was only one bed!”
She’s looking at me now the way Grant and I looked at Raj as he spewed addled nonsense. “Singles’ Weekend,” she corrects gently. “And there was only one bed … because you are only one person.”
“But therain,” I plead.
“It’sLondon,” she says.
