Jeno had had enough and wasn’t speaking to her until she apologized to me. He also talked it all out with our grandmother, who immediately defended me and told him she would no longer help Toren financially if she was determined to keep making trouble for me. Having both Maren and my grandmother believe in my innocence without question settled something inside me that had been raw and wounded for a long time.
That forgiveness for myself that remained so elusive finally felt like it was within my grasp. I wasn’t exactly there yet, but I could feel myself inching closer to absolution.
To ease Jeno’s mind while he was away so he really could focus on himself, and to keep me accountable, I found a local NA group and a regular sponsor to confide in throughout the filming of the rest of the movie. She was a lovely older woman who had been sober for fifteen years. I felt like I could learn a lot from her, and since she didn’t have a personal stake in my sobriety the way Jeno had, it was a little bit easier to be brutally honest with her on the difficult days. The days when I was tired and emotionally drained. The days when reality and fiction were a bit too similar and I had to face the fact that while I’d been the addict, everyone around me had suffered from my addiction.
Heinrich was right. The guy in the script didn’t deserve a nice and neat happy ending. No one would buy it. His sins were too great, and his suffering wasn’t nearly enough. Even though it was mostly my story, I kind of hated myself when I watched the scenes back.
The weather had also shifted in Vancouver. It was cold and wet more often than not, but the dreary atmosphere fit the heavy tone of the scenes we were filming as of late. Off set, I went home with Maren as we settled into the early stages of our relationship. We were getting to know one another better, figuring each other out. I was doing my best to get her to fall in love with me, and felt like I was succeeding. On set, she was in love with the recovered version of my character who forced his way into her life once again. The two of us were happy, carefree, living life to the fullest, but we’d just started shooting the sequence where Maren’s character was diagnosed with cancer. Even though I knew none of it was real, the thought of losing her and watching her act her way through decline and illness was devastating. The makeup department might’ve done too good of a job making her look sick and frail. It was gut-wrenching, and knowing we were getting close to the ending where she died fucked with my head in unexpected ways.
Heinrich swore Maren and I were giving him some of the best performances he’d seen in his career. It was high praise, so I didn’t tell him that for a lot of scenes, I wasn’t acting. I was actually devastated by the thought of losing Maren, and wasn’t sure how I could move forward if something actually happened to her. In the movie, my character slipped back into addiction, which was honestly the saddest part of the movie. In real life, I wanted to believe I was stronger than that, but I had my doubts.
There wasn’t much that could shove me over the edge of sobriety, but losing Maren when I’d just managed to get her might be it.
“Did you see this?” I looked up from my phone as Arrow tossed a magazine down in front of me. It hit the table with a thump. I looked between it and her in confusion, wondering why she was so riled up. Now that I’d been around her a bit when I spent time with Maren, I knew the young woman was very easygoing and unruffled. She seemed totally disinterested in the Hollywood machine. She was honestly only interested in what she could do to make Maren’s life easier. So, I doubted a salacious cover story about me and her boss would have her so heated.
They’d become commonplace since Maren and I decided to be an official couple. We never made a public announcement or had a PR team release a statement, but we didn’t deny that we were together when we did interviews. We no longer went