Page 88 of The Perfect Rom-Com

And the reality is, I don’t care what his explanations are.

I don’t care.

It doesn’t matter.

No excuse to justify this matters.

Because he has broken my trust, and mark my words, he will never ever gain it again.

The bus jolts and I lift my chin as I look at myself in the mirror.

Staring back at the girl with the pale face and heart-shocked eyes.

And find myself gripping a little nugget of truth deep in my gut that drives me toward home.

I may not be rich. I may not be powerful. I may not even be wise enough to discern the difference between honest and dishonest people.

But I have people who love me back home.

And people at home who appreciate me for just who I am.

Who live good, honest, hardworking lives.

And I am smart enough, apparently, to write things people find worth reading.

And I will find another way to get my words out there. For them.

Chapter 18

Bryony, please. Call.

I flip the phone over and slip it into my pocket, but not before Gloria sees who it’s from.

It’s a slow Thursday afternoon on Broadway (at least, as slow as Broadway can be), and a week since I left Jack and all the chaos of the tour bus behind. I’ve spent the week at Gloria’s town house. Showed up out of the blue as soon as I stepped off the plane, and without a word, she welcomed me in.

We haven’t talked much about it. She got the shortest version possible—just enough to appease her desperately curious mind—and then we left it like yesterday’s egg salad sandwich on a concrete patio.

Her pink, tufted yard-sale couch is firm but still a hundred times friendlier than the tiny bunk bed on the tour bus, and a thousand times friendlier than the loneliness of my own apartment. She has more cats than is reasonable (of course, that definition varies by person) and more plants than she can possibly keep up with, so when I sleep it smells like I’m in a conservatory, and when I wake up, it’s usually because a paw from a passing cat has ended up on my ear. And when it’s not a cat, it’s the display of her indoor wind chimes as they jingle in the morning breeze. Gloria always keeps her windows open. It’s absolutely a safety hazard, but she claims her cats will protect her. And to be honest, they might.

I’ve always liked the way Gloria keeps up her life.

She’s a carefree spirit, always has been.

She let me wallow in wind chimes and cat fur and down covers and magazines and takeout and a never-ending stream of emails typed madly to every editor and agent in town (it’s a maddening work of type and wait, type and wait) up until yesterday afternoon, at which point she returned from a deposition, dropped her stenographer bag on the floor, and declared cheerfully, “It’s time to get up!”

So here I am.

En route to 200 West 45th Street on Thursday afternoon for a matinee show of The Lion King because, as Gloria declares, “Nobody can stay down with The Lion King.”

This is the show Gran took us to after Mom passed. Right when we’d first arrived in the city. I remember the moment Timon and Pumbaa cracked their first joke. It was the first time I’d smiled in weeks. I remember seeing Gran watching me out of the corner of her eye, and as it happened, I could see her body sink into the plush red chair with her exhale. Like she was taking her first breath after too long as well.

The Lion King was the first reminder that we could get through this.

That life, while at times terrible, hard, and unpredictable, could never keep goodness from poking through the ground too.

So.

I said yes to Gloria.