“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 theother 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 evengetmy 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 totalk 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?”
