I listen as she walks to her room. Closes the door. Turns on the light. Screeches at the top of her lungs, “What the intercoursing excrement?!”

An evil smile crawls up my face. I watch the door for a few minutes, anticipating Mara’s return, but she never shows up.

44. Angst and Rom-Coms

SIRI

September 3, Thursday 10:20 p.m.

California

Grams and I are forty-five minutes into Runaway Bride when I reach out and hit pause.

I’ve never seen this movie. We’re watching the rise and fall of four different Julia Roberts almost-marriages, and I can’t stop thinking about the questions Jamie had down on her outline. I know nothing about my parents’ marriage. They got married so young, just like Julia Roberts’s character in the first couple of weddings. How did Mom and Dad fall in love?

Grams looks over at me in the light of the television. “Your hair is intense,” she says from her spot up against the edge of the couch. “Just like you.”

I don’t say anything.

“What’s up? You going to press play?” She hugs her legs up onto the couch and curls them next her.

“I want to ask you a question.”

“Ask, then. Julia’s waiting.” The way Grams talks already reminds me so much of Jamie: strangely guarded and cynical, but upbeat at the same time.

I smile at her. “This movie is making me think about Mom and Dad. I feel like I don’t know anything about their relationship. How it started, why it ended. Do you know how they met?”

Grams’s expression flatlines. She pulls her mug of tea from the coffee table and takes a sip before meeting my eyes again. “I’ve been dreading this question for years, Jame. I’m surprised it took you so long. I haven’t volunteered this particular story because I’m not so proud of my part in everything that happened.”

I reposition myself along the edge of the seat cushion where I can sit properly without slouching.

She pulls a blanket off the edge of the couch and tosses it onto her legs. “Your mother and I are both strong-willed women.” She pauses. “I admire her in some ways, but I never embraced her as family. I villainized her. When my husband passed, I missed my son too much. I wanted him near me here in California, and your mother wanted to keep him in New York.

“I could have, should have, been nicer to her. But I encouraged Grier to move back here when he brought it up.”

I frown. Is it Grams’s fault that Jamie and I were separated?

She clears her throat. “Your parents fell for each other very quickly in their junior year of college. They were both involved in a play about that book series they’re so obsessed with.”

“Game of Thrones?”