That she may have broken us up when I asked her to marry me—but she also waited for me. For years.
It makes me want to gather her in my arms and tell her I’m sorry for being so dense. For making her wait for what she could sense was right all along.
I keep reading. Cole and Nina run into each other at a friend’s wedding. They’re both finally single. They fall for each other with all the tenderness and passion that we did.
And then, standing on a cliff in the rain as they’re watching for whales, Cole gets down on one knee and proposes.
He tells Nina she’s his soul mate.
I clench.
Molly writes rom-coms, but I have a terrible feeling this isn’t one. That it’s what she calls a “rom-traum”—the twist on the genre, where the love story is doomed.
Don’t do it, I mentally plead with her. Don’t make them suffer like we have.
But in my heart, I know what’s coming.
Nina says she doesn’t believe in soul mates.
She leaves Cole in Maine.
I frantically scroll down, praying what comes next is not the words THE END.
There are still fifteen pages left in the script.
I’m dying.
We see Nina mourn. I fucked up, she tells her best friend. But I don’t deserve another chance.
TELL HIM, I want to yell at her as I read this. JUST TELL HIM.
There are four pages left, and I can barely breathe.
We switch to Cole’s POV. He and his best friend are making plans to attend their twentieth high school reunion. Is Nina coming? the friend asks. No, Cole says. She hates this kind of thing. And she won’t want to see me.
And he’s right. When they arrive, she’s not there.
Despite knowing she wouldn’t be, Cole is flattened. But just as he’s walking out, someone taps the microphone on the stage.
It’s Nina, standing up there. And she’s looking right at him.
Five years ago, she tells the crowd, I did something really stupid. I told Cole that true love was a fairy tale. That soul mates were bullshit made up by the Hallmark Industrial Complex. We made a bet over it, in fact. If he wins, I have to admit that happily ever afters are real. And if I win, he has to admit that true love is a fantasy—a pit stop along the road to heartbreak.
Well, I’m here to say that maybe neither of us was right. Relationships carry joy and pain. Sometimes big loves fade. Sometimes rocky ones recover. Sometimes life brings unexpected twists. All we can count on is cherishing what we have, and trying like hell to be good to each other.
All we can do is be brave enough to believe in love, and to fight for it.
Cole, I know I messed up. I know I was cowardly, and I hurt you. But this is me, fighting for you. And if you’ll give me another chance, I’ll fight for our happily ever after for the rest of our lives.
He doesn’t even need to think. He runs across the room, dodging gawking classmates, and leaps onto the stage.
They kiss like their lives depend on it.
Sorry you didn’t win the bet, he whispers.
I don’t care about the bet, she says. I only care about you.
He swings her around as the classmates all cheer for them.
THE END
By now I am full-on weeping. The man next to me ignores this for a few minutes and then finally looks over at me.
“You okay, dude? Need a whiskey or something?”
I shake my head.
“Sorry,” I sniffle. “I’m fine. Just really happy.”
And I am.
Because Molly had it in her to write this.
Our happy ending.
But I’m also crying because this screenplay breaks my heart all over again. It proves that this woman knows in precise emotional detail what caused our relationship to collapse. She sees both the ways we have loved each other, and the ways we have failed each other. She gets that neither of us was right about love—her version pessimistic to the point of nihilism, mine optimistic to the point of parody. And rather than talking this out with me, and trying to make our relationship work, she wrote a perfect movie about it.
This script proves that she pursued me, loved me, grieved me. And yeah, it’s an idealized version of us, with a fairy-tale ending that is too pat and tidy to stand up to real life. And yeah, like she’s always saying, the story ends at the good part, at the peak of their happiness.
