NINA
(TO THE WAITER)
Another glass of prosecco, please.
COLE
(TO THE WAITER)
Make that a Negroni, with an extra splash of Campari. Nina likes things bitter.
Nina and Cole lock eyes. These two have history. He sits down in an empty chair next to her.
COLE
How have you been since you broke my heart fifteen years ago? Still out there drowning kittens and making toddlers cry?
NINA
Not to mention embezzling retirement funds from the elderly.
COLE
Weird, given you always sucked at math.
NINA
Funny. Actually, I write screenplays. Rom-coms.
Cole bursts out laughing.
COLE
That’s a bit ironic, don’t you think? You always hated anything that had to do with love. I should know.
NINA
I always liked money. And they pay well. What do you do?
COLE
I’m an attorney. Family law.
NINA
Oh my God. You’re a divorce lawyer?
Holy shit.
Is this about us? Did Molly write a screenplay about us?
This is what she’s been doing while I wake up in the night unable to breathe? Turning our love into punch lines?
I’m shocked she’s able to keep hurting me, given how wretched I already feel, but I shouldn’t be; no one was ever able to twist the knife like Molly Marks.
I should stop reading this out of self-preservation, but I can’t bring myself to.
I’m rapt as Nina and Cole start flirting and arguing over who knows more about love. They pick five couples to bet on, including themselves.
My car reaches the airport and I force myself to stop reading long enough to get through security. At the gate, I get in trouble for staring at my phone and holding up the priority boarding line.
I can’t help it. I see words we’ve said to each other on the page, verbatim. You make me astonishingly happy, he tells her. You’ll find the love of your life, and she’ll be a very lucky woman, she tells him. And my heart goes into hummingbird mode remembering how it felt to say and hear these things. Knowing these moments are burned into Molly’s memory the same way they’re burned into mine.
My anger has sharpened into something more complex. This bittersweet feeling of resentment and nostalgia and joy, all at once.
I rip through Act II, and just like me and Molly, Nina and Cole run into each other at a baseball game and have a great time. But at the end of the night, when she tries to kiss him, he tells her he’s in a relationship.
She acts cool, but as soon as he leaves, she sobs with her head against the steering wheel of her car in the parking lot, surrounded by raucous tailgaters lighting streamers and setting off firecrackers so loud that her windows shake.
I think of that day in Molly’s car, after the baby shower. Her face when I said I was seeing someone. I knew she was disappointed. I didn’t know she was crushed.
But it’s here: she was crushed. She never mentioned that to me. I guess she wouldn’t have. She doesn’t like to share her vulnerabilities.
Instead, she writes them into her characters.
And the character she wrote? Nina? She’s pining. And Cole doesn’t see it. He gets engaged to the wrong woman, and he doesn’t see it. He “takes time to heal” when that relationship ends, even though Nina is right there—and he still doesn’t see it.
I always felt like I was the one doing the chasing. But I realize, reading this, that Molly was chasing me too. That I hurt her, deeply, in ways I couldn’t help any more than she could have helped hurting me.
