I Wrote Their Love Story, So I Wrote Myself Out novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cash on Friday

Jasper carries film cans for rent while Isla mocks the best-lit lie on the internet, and Dennis sends the papers with Jasper's own initials on them.

On Friday morning I came downstairs with an envelope of cash and found a delivery van blocking the street.

I had not slept.

The master drive was in my backpack under the bed, and Wyatt's Monday was three days off.

Somewhere around four I had decided that Dennis could send his lawyers, because he was not getting the drive by FedEx.

"You're late," Isla said.

"Rent is due today. I'm early."

"The rent is due at noon. The film is due now."

She pointed at the van, where a driver was unloading four grey metal cans onto the pavement.

Each can held a feature on a reel, and each one was heavy enough to make my arms shake.

"A hundred and ten pounds a week," I said, and held out the envelope.

"Carry the cans to the booth and I'll knock off twenty."

"That's not how rent works."

"It's how this building works."

I carried the cans.

The booth was up a back stair so narrow I had to turn sideways, and every step creaked in a different key.

When I came down for the last one, she had set her laptop on the box office counter and was eating toast with her other hand.

On the screen, Demi and Wyatt were doing the dishes in the loft.

It was Tuesday's episode, the one about the burnt lasagna.

I had written it at my own kitchen table in Queens with Demi asleep in the next room.

"You watch that?" I asked.

"Every week. I have for years." She tilted the screen toward me. "It's the best-lit lie on the internet."

"A lie?"

"Nobody washes dishes that tenderly. He's drying the same plate for the fourth time, because he's waiting for his cue."

I looked.

Wyatt was drying the same plate.

I'd told him to keep his hands busy until I said go, and he had done it for three years without ever asking why.

"Then why watch it?" I said.

"The camera." She put down the toast. "Whoever shoots it knows more about light than anybody in Leith. Look at that window. He's let the street go slightly overexposed so her face is the only thing in the room that has a shadow."

"Maybe it was an accident."

"It wasn't an accident. It's the same window in every episode and it's never once been an accident." She closed the laptop halfway. "Nobody knows who he is. That's the shame of it."

She looked at me then, and I picked up the can and said nothing.

I carried the last can upstairs.

At eleven, when I'd put twenty pounds back in the envelope and paid her ninety, my phone rang in the lobby.

It was a New York number I hadn't saved.

"Jasper," said Dennis Crane, warm and in no hurry. "Where have you been? We've all been sick."

"Hello, Dennis."

"Let me be brief, because I know you're busy being dramatic. You are the most talented person I have ever worked with."

"Okay."

"The finale is three weeks from tonight, rooftop, live, eleven million dollars sitting at the end of it. They can't do it without you."

"Go on."

"I'm authorized to offer forty thousand dollars to come back and direct the proposal."

"Forty thousand."

"Plus the flight home, a car, whatever you want."

I said, "I'm not coming back, Dennis."

"Everyone says that on day four."

"I wrote the script. They'll have it on the teleprompter. I don't have to be in the room."

"You locked the teleprompter."

"I locked my own access."

"The teleprompter is in your name, because you set up the account." He sighed. "Fine. I'll be honest, since you're being difficult. You don't have a leg to stand on. Your name isn't on a single contract the sponsor has seen."

"I made that channel."

"You made a short film for your reel. The company made the channel. You were a contractor, and the company has the footage. Surely you understand that."

"Since when am I a contractor?"

"Since March, Jasper." He sounded almost gentle. "You signed it yourself."

I said nothing.

"I'm sending you a copy so you can stop being angry at the wrong people."

The call ended.

The email arrived while I was still holding the phone.

It was a scan, fourteen pages, the type of stack that comes with a sponsor deal and goes unread.

I knew it before I scrolled.

One night in March, Demi had slid a pile of papers across our kitchen table.

She'd been tired, still in her stage makeup from a shoot, and she'd put a pen on top.

Sponsor boilerplate, she'd said. Initial where the yellow tabs are.

I'd initialed every tab without reading it, because it was Demi, and it was late, and it was boilerplate.

On the sixth page, under the heading Assignment of Ownership, I found a yellow tab and my own small neat initials next to it.

J. H.

The ink was black, the way my pen writes.

On the page after that, under the company's name, someone had already typed the list of owners.

It had two names.

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