How to End a Love Story

by Yulin Kuang

Helen has never been cool enough to be “a music person.” She prefers leaving that up to strangers on the internet who’ve experienced the same specific soundtrack-worthy moments in life—“cozy October morning in the kitchen” or “driving toward my uncertain future”—and hoping they’ll tell her exactly what songs would bring those feelings out best, like a purple scarf for green eyes. As Stevie Nicks croons

Travel is a way of turning the page,

She thinks this is the kind of thing she’d talk to a sister about—a real one, not the forced found-family type.

The type of sister who grows up alongside you and understands without explanations why your faulty brain can’t seem to process the subtly shifting dynamics of a social circle without a dramatic sense of tragic despair.

New chapter, new problems.

nods. “Of course. They won’t, though. I trust you.” Suraya laughs as she looks sideways at Helen. “That’s such a nice thing to say,” she says. “I wouldn’t go throwing that around casually in this town if I were you, though.”

“All the feelings. Like the first day of school.”

Suraya smiles. “My youngest just started kindergarten last year. She was so excited, and then she spent the entire first day crying for us to pick her up because she didn’t like the other kids.” “That won’t happen to me,” Helen promises. “Of course it won’t. That wasn’t a metaphor; we’re just talking about my kids now,” Suraya laughs. “Oh.” Helen is slightly embarrassed. “Occupational hazard,” Suraya says. “We overshare and mine our personal lives for work, and inevitably some useless information ends up on the table and you’ll walk around LA for the next decade knowing some random detail about someone else’s kids.”

Helen is aware that she’s doing that thing where she sounds weirdly formal, like she was raised by Victorian ghosts or something, and immediately regrets saying anything at all.

This night was supposed to be the start of a new chapter, a career highlight. The fact that she’s thinking about Grant Fucking Shepard tonight seems like a cruel prank of the universe—that even from beyond the grave, little sisters have a talent for inserting themselves into places where they weren’t invited.

Michelle would have hated you. The vicious thought comes unbidden. Too desperate.

The problem for Grant has never been beginnings. It’s that none of his relationships ever seem to survive a second act. Dating him, living with him, loving him becomes too sad, he needs you too much, and he always seems to be attracted to beautiful, complicated women who are smart enough to eventually recognize it’s not their responsibility to fix him, though they truly hope he heals someday.

He knows he’s catastrophizing, that it’s technically unhealthy, but somehow it makes him feel better.

You’re too good-looking to be a writer, Helen immediately wants to say out loud. You didn’t have an awkward teen phase that forced you to develop a rich interior life to compensate.

“Friendly,” Helen says. “Sure. Professionally, anyway.” If he notices the addendum, he doesn’t seem to care much. He taps the linen tablecloth, thoughtful.

“There are things we can do, but it’s good to ask ourselves if we should do them.”

Grant studies Helen from across the table now and thinks of how many more mirrored experiences they must have had in the last thirteen years, for them both to end up here.

She sometimes wonders if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do, and if the ones closest to her can sense it.

fucking person, but I’m being an idiot.” “You’re not an idiot,” Chelsea had said soothingly. “You’re a number one New York Times bestselling author.” She hates how quickly that actually did make her feel better.

She feels their eyes on her like floodlights, everyone waiting for her to say something brilliant or at least relevant, and the idea that she might say something obviously stupid to these very smart and much more experienced people becomes a premonition of mind-numbing clarity. Her thoughts stutter and trip over each other on their way from her brain to her mouth, and she’s angry at her words for betraying her in this hour of need.

Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.

Mind over matter.

She still associates marijuana with a slightly bohemian, laissez-faire, underground lifestyle that’s cooler than she ever will be, though she knows it’s been legalized in California for so long that driving past high-end cannabis dispensaries that could front as Apple Stores has become a normal part of her daily routine.

She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.

So she threw herself into her work and presented her achievements like bargaining chips in her social circles—See how useful I am as a friend? Don’t I seem valuable as a long-term investment, even if I’m not that fun?

Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.

Oh no, she thinks with a laugh, I’m thirty-one and peer pressure still works on me.

“Is this hot to women?” Tom asks. “Yes!” Helen, Nicole, Eve, and Saskia shout at him. “In fiction, babe,” Eve says, patting his arm. “In real life, I much prefer a nice boy who can cook a mean lasagna.”

“I haven’t gone on a second date since Labor Day,” Grant objects. “And Helen would agree: it’s the second one that makes it significant.”

“More than I thought I would, actually. It’s just that I’ve always seen myself as an East Coast person. I grew up in New Jersey, I went to school in New Hampshire, I moved to New York as soon as I could. Ninety percent of my wardrobe only works ten percent of the year out here.”

The thing Helen struggles to imagine most is her sister today, if things had been normal. It’s as though her brain stumbles, suddenly flummoxed every time: This is the end, you are leaving the city limits of imaginable things.

“You feel a lot of responsibility for other people’s feelings,” her therapist once told her, as she described the careful little ways she frames her life for her parents.

“Pretty much nothing,” Helen laughs. “Sulk in my bedroom and regress into my teenage self, mostly. It’s like time doesn’t pass in our house.”

“I took her suicide really personally,” she laughs, and it comes out a stifled, wet sound. “It felt like she took all the love I had to give and said, no, it’s not good enough. Which is probably not the healthiest way of looking at it. But—I am so sick of always being the healthy one.”

“She was—loud and bright and unpredictable,”

“I’m sorry,” Grant murmurs, and she wonders what he’s apologizing for. “We buried her in the Chinese community section of the cemetery. So she’s spending eternity with all the old grandmas and grandpas and Saturday-morning Chinese school principals who never approved of her. If ghosts exist, she’s probably giving them hell.”

“A lot of sci-fi,” she says, scanning his paperback collection. “Hard fantasy,” he corrects reflexively. She laughs, then glances up at him with a suggestive smile. “Dirty.”

After a minor sulk and soak in her bathtub about it, she concluded he was leaving the ball in her court. And she would let it bounce there until leaves collected and rains came and everyone abandoned the game.

“Be still my heart, modern romance isn’t dead.”

She tries not to think too much about Grant Shepard on the ice surrounded by children—her ovaries can’t take it.

“What you need is a good, old-fashioned terms-of-services agreement,” Nicole says at last. “That way, everything stays aboveboard and everyone’s on the same page. Extremely vital in any situationship. The earlier you talk it out, the better.”

“Some writers are bad in the room, but great on the page,” she

“You mean, why am I entangled in this sexy situation with no real future instead of finding a nice young man to settle down with?” That’s not what he meant at all, but he waits for her to answer her own question. “Guess I’m just not ready to be healthy yet,” she says finally. “Someday, though.”

It suddenly seemed strange and sad that they weren’t together anymore.

“You trauma bonded your way into mutual attraction.” Nicole nods. “Healthy.”

“I think he might think he’s in love, or not even love, but catching inconvenient feelings. I think he’s the ‘falling in love, catching feelings’ type. You’ve met him.”

You’re smart, but you’re not smarter than dumbass lizard-brain feelings. You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.”

“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.” She stares at him and knows if she