I grimace. “That’s literally the worst idea ever. What I did to him, the things I said . . . You didn’t see his face tonight, Annie. Even without trying, I think I broke his heart. I’m not making him deal with more of this.” I gesture at myself and make a face.

Annie shakes her head. “I agree with you that you shouldn’t play around with Nick’s emotions. You know the kind of music that man listens to; he’s prone to big feelings. But that doesn’t mean you should write this off just because you made a mistake. He knows you, Chloe. He knows everything about you, and he loves you. He wants to deal with this.” She mimics my gesture.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I ask. “We’re supposed to be in a fight.”

Annie laughs. “We’re not very good at fighting.”

I sigh. “No. We’re not. I’m sorry I got so upset about the movie.”

Annie shakes her head, her curls bobbing. “No, I’m sorry that I didn’t even consider how you felt about the movie. Honestly, it was kind of screwed up to write a movie about your life.”

“But this was your big break,” I say, reaching down to pet Leia’s head as she sniffs my feet. “I wasn’t going to tell you not to do it.”

“Yeah, but.” Annie bites her lip. “I wish we could’ve talked about it. You didn’t have to pretend like everything was fine to make me happy.”

“Well.” I shrug. “That’s kind of my thing.”

“I know what you need to do,” Annie says with sudden confidence.

I eye her skeptically.

“A grand gesture,” she says, and all of a sudden I remember us sitting in her old room, our roles reversed, as I tried to help her get Drew back after they had a fight and he jetted off to New York. She wanted to live out her rom-com dream, and I encouraged her to follow him to the airport and then to New York City to declare her love for him in what turned out to be an on-air segment of a morning show.

I could kick Past Chloe for how naïve she was.

“No, no, no.” I shake my head exaggeratedly, like Annie is a small child and I’m explaining why she shouldn’t stick her finger in an electrical socket. “Grand gestures are great for you, Annie. But those things only happen in movies, and they’re clichés. Tropes. Not real life.”

“All I’m saying is, there was a grand gesture in my real life, and it worked out pretty great for me.”

I scowl. “Yeah, but you wanted your life to be a romantic comedy. That’s the difference: I don’t.”

Annie tilts her head and looks at me. “Maybe you need to accept that your life is a rom-com, whether you want it to be or not.”

“No thanks,” I mutter. “But maybe you’re right about the whole ‘letting people help me’ thing. Thanks for helping me with these poms.”