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did it.
    “It never ends,” he’d say.
    “We could hire someone,” Georgie would offer.
    “We don’t need to hire someone.”
    Their neighbors had a nanny and a cleaning lady, a lawn guy, a pool guy, and a dog groomer who made house calls. Neal hated them. “You shouldn’t need a staff of people larger than your own family. We don’t live in a manor.”
    “Like the Malfoys,” Alice said. “With house elves.”
    Neal was reading her the Harry Potter books.
    Neal mowed their lawn. In worn-out cargo pants and T-shirts that he’d had since high school. He always smelled like sunblock, because without it, he’d immediately burn. Even with the sunblock, the back of his neck was stained red.
    Neal trimmed the trees. Neal kept tulip bulbs in the refrigerator and sketched garden plans on the back of Whole Foods receipts. He’d pore over seed catalogs in bed and make Georgie choose which plants she liked best.
    “Purple eggplant or white eggplant?” he’d asked her last summer.
    “How can you have a white eggplant? That’s like . . . purple green beans.”
    “There are purple green beans. And yellow oranges.”
    “Stop. You’re blowing my mind.”
    “Oh, I’ll blow your mind. Girlie.”
    “Are you flirting with me?”
    He’d turned to her then, pen cap in mouth, and cocked his head. “Yeah. I think so.”
    Georgie looked down at her old sweatshirt. At her threadbare yoga pants. “This is what does it for you?”
    Neal smiled most of a smile, and the cap fell out of his mouth. “So far.”
    Neal . . .
    She’d call him tomorrow morning. She’d get through to him this time. This was just—this had just been a weird couple of days. Georgie was busy. And Neal was busy. And time zones weren’t on their side.
    And he was pissed with her.
    She’d make it better; she didn’t blame him. Everything would be better in the morning.
    Morning glories , Georgie thought to herself just before she fell asleep.

CHAPTER 6
     
    O ne missed call.
    Fuck, fuck, fuck.
    Georgie’d woken up on the couch this morning a half hour after her alarm would have gone off if she’d remembered to set it. She ran upstairs to take a shower, then threw on a new pair of jeans and the Metallica T-shirt. (It still smelled more like Neal than like Georgie.)
    When she went to grab her phone on the way out, she saw the text alert:
    One missed call
    An Emergency Contact
    That’s what Neal was filed under in Georgie’s contacts. (Just in case.) (Of something.) There was a voice mail, too—she hit PLAY but Neal hadn’t left anything, just a half second of silence. He must have called while she was in the shower.
    Georgie called right back, got Neal’s voice mail and started talking as soon she heard the beep. “Hi,” she said. “It’s me. I just missed your call, but I won’t miss it again—call me. Call me whenever. You won’t be interrupting anything.”
    As soon as she hung up, she felt like an idiot. Because of course he’d be interrupting something. That’s why Georgie had stayed in L.A., because she couldn’t be interrupted.
    Fuck.
     
    Georgie wasn’t any good that morning.
    Seth was pretending not to notice. He was also pretending not to notice her Metallica T-shirt.
    “It feels weird to be writing a different show in here,” Scotty said, looking around the writers’ room. “It’s like we’re doing it in our parents’ bed.” He was sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the conference table, even though there were eight empty chairs closer to Seth and Georgie. “I wish the front-desk girl was here to make us coffee. Georgie, do you know how to make coffee?”
    “Are you kidding me?”
    Scotty rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that in a sexist way. I just genuinely don’t know how to turn on the coffee machine. You’d think they’d make that part obvious.”
    “Well, I don’t know either,” she said.
    Seth looked up at Scotty over his laptop. “Why don’t you go get us coffee?” he said. “We