Cut to the Ending

by Maria Millage

Genres: Romance; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A deliciously swoony Hollywood romcom about an aspiring screenwriter who gets the opportunity to write the finale of a megahit fantasy franchise, and the nerdy—but annoyingly hot—assistant she teams up with to teach her the series’ canon, for readers of How to End a Love Story and Book Lovers.

"A must-read love letter to fandoms and Hollywood​." —Laura Marie Meyers, author of The MASH Up

Delaney Webber knows the price of Hollywood success: long hours, a caffeine addiction, and sacrificing any semblance of a personal life. But a year after a misogynistic producer torpedoed her screenwriting career, she’s stuck running errands for her eccentric boss-slash-mentor. When he offers her the chance to finish the fantasy franchise that made him a household name—Magician’s Gambit—she jumps at the opportunity to get her career back on track. There’s just one problem: she’s never seen it. 
 
Not-quite-reformed nerd Max Sullivan is one Slack notification away from a mental breakdown. As the assistant to one of LA’s most powerful (and terrifying) talent managers, he’s Living the Dream—aka barely keeping his anxiety in check while juggling hyper-specific coffee orders and overinflated egos. But it’s worth it for the opportunity to one day make the kind of movies his dad raised him on, movies like Magician’s Gambit.
 
It’s the perfect match to save both their careers. Max needs his big break; Delaney needs someone to teach her the difference between an orc and a hobbit. But as their Magician’s Gambit lessons turn strictly unprofessional and their electric chemistry becomes impossible to ignore, they must decide if their future is worth fighting for, or if it’s time to roll the credits.

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

In Delaney Webber’s world, time was more valuable than money, and she didn’t have enough to spare on the newest doe-eyed blonde behind Landmark Talent Management’s reception desk.

“You’re a bit early,” the receptionist said with a smile, and gestured to the lobby’s empty seating area. “Please take a seat and I’ll let Lorelai’s office know you’re here.”

If Landmark didn’t tear through support staff faster than Leonardo DiCaprio did twenty-four-year-old models, the recent college grad in the call center headset would have known that not only was Delaney always early, but Lorelai expected her to be. Because in the not-so-distant past, Delaney had been Lorelai’s office.

Still, she returned the receptionist’s smile with one of her own and settled onto the slippery leather couch she’d helped source four years ago when the partners had wanted the lobby remodeled. She hated it just as much now as she had then, but like the row of bonsai trees behind the reception desk and explosion of glass blanketed in last month’s editions of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter that was more art piece than coffee table, it hadn’t been chosen for comfort or practicality. Every piece of furniture in the office had one job: look expensive. First impressions were everything in Hollywood, and the impression of money was often more important than actually having it.

That was where people like Delaney (the executive assistants and PAs who made up the invisible stage crew Landmark’s newest receptionist might one day be lucky enough to join) came in. They were the grease that kept Hollywood running, dealing in backdoor tricks and whisper-network secrets so its Botoxed faces could shake hands in boardrooms and sweat under hot studio lights without wasting precious energy on remembering their kids’ birthdays or where they’d parked their Range Rover.

Delaney could guarantee a same-day reservation at Nobu, juggle four cups of coffee sans carrier tray without spilling a drop, and had the after-hours number of five locksmiths memorized, with a sixth on speed dial. She could get even the most stubborn stains out of silk and was a certified Microsoft Office Wizard with a fake-looking but very real certificate pinned up in her office to prove it.

She was the best assistant every one of her bosses had ever had and, at only twenty-eight, now served as the right-hand woman to one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters. It was an opportunity most of her film school classmates would have gleefully sawed off their own arm for, and while Delaney still had all four of her original limbs, she’d nonetheless sacrificed her fair share at the altar of Hollywood success. And she had too much to do today to justify waiting for Lorelai’s assistant to retrieve her from the lobby like a wayward package. So, as always, she’d texted her former boss from the parking garage, and her reply appeared as Delaney was straightening the coffee table’s magazine selection.

Lorelai: Wrapping up a call. You can come back.

The receptionist must have received a similar order, because she barely looked up from her computer as Delaney slipped through one of the arched doorways separating the lobby from the open-concept back office.

Landmark was a boutique management company founded in the late ’90s by a trio of high-powered agents exhausted by the cutthroat office politics of Hollywood’s mega-agencies. The partners still managed a select roster of A- and B-list clients but spent more time at their Telluride vacation properties or chatting up celebrities over tapas that cost more than the rent on Delaney’s first apartment than they did in the office. As head of the Talent Department, Lorelai and her counterpart in Literary oversaw the real work done by a healthy team of eleven managers and their assistants.

Lorelai’s assistant should have been back from the afternoon coffee run by now, but the desk in front of her closed office door was empty. Their monitor was dark from inactivity, and Delaney’s fingers twitched, itching to jiggle the mouse. She hadn’t conducted Lorelai’s business like a world-class orchestra from behind that desk in three years, but old habits died hard.

Lorelai was still on the phone when Delaney slipped inside her office, but she gestured one-handedly to the uncomfortably modern chairs pulled up to her desk. As if Delaney needed the reminder. They had this dance down to a precise science.

“Gentlemen, I have another meeting,” Lorelai said. She was dwarfed by the high back of her rolling chair, but it made her look powerful instead of small. A queen holding court before her subjects. “But this all sounds good to me. I look forward to reviewing your revised offer.” She hung up without waiting for a response. “Apologies for the wait. That was supposed to be a fifteen-minute sync.”

Delaney had started reorganizing her afternoon mid-conversation with the receptionist—she needed to call American Express about canceling a duplicate restaurant charge on her boss’s credit card, but picking up his dog’s new allergy medication would have to wait until tomorrow if she was going to make it back to the office before the interns left for the day. Managing constantly shifting priorities was the calling card of a good assistant, and she was an especially good one. “No problem.”

“I have a dinner in an hour,” Lorelai added, “but we have a… delicate situation to discuss first.”

Nine times out of ten, these bimonthly syncs on the finer details of Lee’s career were a formality during which they might have shot the shit if either Delaney or Lorelai were the type, but once or twice a year, something important enough to warrant a standing face-to-face meeting reared its inconvenient head.

They were Delaney’s least favorite meetings.

She smoothed out a wrinkle in her skirt. “Is there a problem with Yonder?”

Lee had written Over Yonder Horizon, a futuristic space Western featuring a blaster-toting heroine he described as the unhinged love child of Annie Oakley and The Princess Bride’s Dread Pirate Roberts in a single weekend, fueled by stone-cold inspiration and enough 5-Hour Energies to kill a racehorse. Zodiac Studios, his longtime creative partners, had greenlit it off a vague pitch, but as written, the script would require an above-average budget, and the trades had been reporting on Zodiac’s less-than-stellar financials for months. If they put it on ice or killed it outright, Lee would be crushed. Delaney hadn’t seen him so excited about a project since they’d shot down his idea for a Texas Chainsaw–inspired bloodbath with the wink-and-a-nudge satire of Scream, calling it “brilliant but frightening, and likely alienating to our core audience.”

He had the email framed on his desk.

“He knows he’s late on his deadline,” she added. “I’ll make sure it’s turned in by the end of the week.”

“It’s not about Yonder.”

Delaney was intimately familiar with that expression. It telegraphed I have something to say and you’re not going to like it, but when it came to Lee and Zodiac, delicate could be only the tip of a very ugly iceberg. “Lorelai.”

Lorelai’s mouth tightened. “It’s about Magician’s Gambit V.”

Delaney groaned. This wasn’t just going to fuck up her day. It was going to fuck up her month.

“Like I said,” Lorelai said, voice clipped. “Delicate.”

“And I’ll tell you what he’s going to say: Fuck no.”

Lee was a studio’s dream: a once-in-a-generation creative talent famous for out-of-the-box ideas that generated blockbuster paydays but who didn’t throw hissy fits over notes. Until it came to Magician’s Gambit, the franchise that had shot his career into the stratosphere. Then he was about as flexible as a statue.

“This should hardly be a surprise,” Lorelai said.

Delaney arched an eyebrow. “Isn’t it?”

“Delaney—”

“He’d rather run across the 405 naked and singing ‘Ave Maria’ than touch Magician’s Gambit with a ten-foot pole. You know this. I know this. I thought Zodiac did, too.”

Her bluntness had its intended effect, cracking through Lorelai’s blank mask. She leaned forward. “Look. This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Zodiac has been aggressive in the acquisitions department lately, and it hasn’t paid off. The board is unhappy. They need a guaranteed win.”

There were very few such things in Hollywood, but a new Magician’s Gambit movie was one of them. It was Zodiac’s highest grossing franchise by a landslide and, despite a decade-long hiatus Lee would have happily allowed to become indefinite, still boasted a thriving online fan community that would show up in droves to watch him read the phone book.

“You got him to agree to GambitCon,” Lorelai pointed out.

Delaney squeezed the bridge of her nose. “I talked him into one panel, and even that was a fight. You’re his manager. Manage him.”

Most people would never dream of speaking to Lorelai this way, but three years of steering her star client’s career had earned Delaney special privileges.

“He’ll dig his heels in and say no on principle,” Lorelai said. “But if it comes from you, he might do it. He listens to you.”

On paper, Delaney’s job was a boring cocktail of maintaining Lee’s calendar, collecting the receipts he was prone to losing before they could disappear into the dryer’s lint trap, and reminding him to log on to Zoom meetings, but in practice she was more akin to a mob boss’s bag man—trusted with confidential family secrets and responsible for busting his enemies’ metaphorical kneecaps. She knew his passwords. His social security number. The street he’d grown up on and how just a dash of cream in his coffee would confine him to the bathroom for hours, but that he’d sell his soul for a bowl of Blue Bell ice cream anyway. How to persuade him to make a brief appearance at the convention honoring his career’s greatest achievement (beyond the Oscar on his mantel) despite the baggage that came with it.

But she also knew Lee had closed the book on Magician’s Gambit a decade ago, and no amount of money or begging would persuade him to open it again.

“He won’t do it,” she said, firm.

Lorelai made a frustrated noise. “I’ll tell you what. You make sure Zodiac has a first draft of Magician’s Gambit V by Labor Day, and I’ll make sure they know you’re the one who made it happen.”

Delaney stilled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll get you a meeting. They have projects in the pipeline you might be a good fit for.”

Delaney liked her job, but she hadn’t gotten up in front of her first-grade class and declared she wanted to coordinate every aspect of a famous screenwriter’s life when she grew up. No one tossed and turned in their childhood bed dreaming of scheduling a forty-four-year-old man’s haircuts or arguing with a credit card company on his behalf. Lee, like the internships and poorly paying assistant jobs before him, was a stepping stone she’d carefully chosen to get her one step closer to what she really wanted: her name in the credits. Not buried deep in the crawl as Assistant to Mr. Cooke, but top billing. A written by credit sturdy enough to build a career on.

And Lorelai knew it. It was why, when Lee’s last assistant had put in his notice, Delaney’s was the only resume Lorelai had given him to consider.

“I don’t write hard genre,” Delaney said. “I’m not Lee.”

Zodiac put out high-octane thrill rides with joke-cracking, gun-or-sword-toting heroes in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. Delaney wrote elevated dramas that were more interested in untangling the threads of complex interpersonal relationships than they were shooting up a Mafia bar on the moon.

“They’re diversifying,” Lorelai said, nonplussed. “And you have before.”

Delaney looked away.

She didn’t want to talk about Our Last Day at the End of the World, or the catastrophic lows that had come with it. That script was dead, locked away in a drawer, and it was going to stay there.

But a meeting with Zodiac would be a booster pack strapped to her back. It might not take her all the way, but she’d be closer than she was now, troubleshooting Lee’s IT issues and ferrying his dog to the dermatologist whenever Samwise’s eczema flared up.

It was the next stepping stone. The one she’d been waiting three years for.

“Talk to him,” Lorelai pressed. “And I’ll talk to Zodiac.”

About you.

The promise hung in the air between them, sweet like honey and tempting like sin.

Max Sullivan was late, and his office building’s glacially slow elevator wasn’t helping.

He avoided his reflection, red-faced and sweaty from power walking up Rodeo Drive in the blazing heat of an unseasonably warm May, as the doors finally slid open onto the thirteenth floor. Behind the black marble reception desk, Sydney perked up. “Oh, Max, there you are!”

In his limited experience, nothing good ever came from the phrase there you are!

“Here I am,” he said anyway.

“Lorelai’s three thirty just went back.”

He didn’t need to check the minimalist clock behind Sydney’s head to know he wasn’t that late. “It’s not even three fifteen.”

“She was kind of intense.” Sydney shrugged and reached for her ringing phone. “Landmark Talent Management.”

Lorelai’s three thirty was an ambiguously titled “DW Touch Base” scheduled to repeat on the third Monday of every other month. He’d asked last week if he needed to confirm the meeting with someone, but his boss had replied with only a vague hand wave he’d interpreted as no, before asking him to investigate why her iPad wasn’t turning on (it was dead).

“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Sydney.”

The usual soundtrack of ringing phones and hushed voices trailed him past Landmark’s glass-walled conference room, the Accounting Department, and the kitchen to the back of the office where, depending on how much she liked you, sentiment said Lorelai was either out of the way or lording over everyone like a puffed-up peacock.

According to the temp who had half-heartedly trained him after his predecessor had allegedly fled onto the streets of Beverly Hills crying one afternoon, never to be seen or heard from again, Lorelai’s afternoon cappuccino needed to be in her hands by five after, but he also wasn’t allowed to leave his desk until she returned from her touch base with Todd and the partners at 2:45.

Last week, he’d hit a personal best of 3:07 and, though Lorelai hadn’t acknowledged his achievement except to note her bran muffin was stale and could he double-check next time, he’d floated back to his desk filled with a sick sense of pride.

After three years in the Hollywood agency trenches, Max was no stranger to difficult bosses or their bordering-on-absurd demands, but the pace of Lorelai’s desk could have exhausted an Olympic sprinter. The job itself wasn’t difficult—screening calls, sending emails, and liaising with clients were all standard assistant duties he’d mastered on his first desk—but the sheer volume meant the average day felt more like army basic training than a nine-to-five.

But he hadn’t taken this job expecting an easy paycheck or to be patted on the head and told he was a good boy. He’d taken it because three years in, he was no closer to where he’d imagined he’d be at twenty-five than the day he’d graduated from college with a diploma in one hand and lofty dreams of moving to Los Angeles to make the kind of unabashedly nerdy movies his dad had raised him on in the other.

He’d done what every “So You Moved to LA! Now What?” blog post said he should: gotten a job at a talent agency and put in a year of long hours for minuscule pay with the intention of parlaying the experience into a better-paying and hopefully less stressful desk job at a studio or production company. Except while his peers moved on to bigger and better things, every interview Max managed to land ended with the same well-meaning but ultimately soul-sucking platitude: You’re a fantastic candidate, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction.

When a second year of agency experience failed to garner better results, he’d been forced to accept his resume wasn’t the issue. It was him. The hands clenched tight in his lap so they wouldn’t visibly shake and the crack in his voice when he was nervous.

So he’d pivoted. To Lorelai and her reputation for sniffing out talent and supercharging her former assistants’ careers.

Her door was closed, and his desk was just as he’d left it—bare, with a spiral notepad next to his mouse and a flat-lay monthly calendar displaying August of last year left behind by an old assistant. He dropped his key card into the top drawer, shrugged out of the jacket he definitely should have left on the back of his chair, and listened carefully at his boss’s door.

“… not making any promises,” an unfamiliar voice said.

“I’m not asking you to.” That was Lorelai, voice clipped and exasperated. “But even I can’t hold them off forever.”

He double-checked her bran muffin, just in case it had somehow gone stale in the ride up the elevator, then rapped on the wood.

“Come in!” Lorelai called.

He pushed the door open only far enough to slip inside. “I have your coffee?”

His last boss had been industry old guard, secure at the top of the food chain with a stable of current and former stars that kept him in fast cars and luxury Mediterranean cruises. He’d approached their careers like a hobbyist gardener, puttering around in the afternoons with a watering can and stepping in with the shears only when he needed to, but Lorelai—a petite statue of a woman poured into a rotating set of exquisitely tailored pastel pantsuits and boosted only barely to five foot four by sensible black heels that could still impale a person—wasn’t just in the business of managing careers. She manufactured stars.

Exhibit A: Lee Cooke, co-creator of the massively successful high fantasy franchise Max had been obsessed with for most of his life, and the crown jewel of her impressive roster. Exhibit B: the equally impressive list of ex-assistants now working on studio lots and in boardrooms across town, launched up the corporate ladder by Lorelai’s recommendation whispered into the ear of the right person at the right time, and whose ranks Max intended to join, even if he had to spend the next three years convincing Lorelai he was worth the investment.

“Oh, excellent.” His boss stood and leaned over her desk to accept her coffee and muffin. “Have you met Delaney?”

“No, I don’t—” The rest of the sentence died in his throat as he turned to get his first good look at Lorelai’s three thirty.

Three years in Los Angeles had desensitized him to the reality of stumbling across the most beautiful person he’d ever seen in the 7-Eleven candy aisle at midnight, but Delaney wasn’t just attractive. She was gorgeous in a Real Person kind of way he’d forgotten existed amid the parade of Botoxed and surgically rearranged faces that passed his desk on the daily.

Red hair. Skin so pale he’d believe she never left the house without an umbrella, even in the heat of summer. Posture that would have impressed a prima ballerina and long legs in magenta tights under a checkered skirt, one knee draped neatly over the other. And an expressionless stare, identical to the one Lorelai had turned on him when she’d opened his interview with the worst question for anyone who struggled with anxiety: So, Max, tell me about yourself.

Delaney, though, said nothing. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse in light of the word salad he’d spewed at Lorelai about the Dorian Ashcroft cosplay he’d once worn to GambitCon before he remembered that he wanted her to hire him so maybe he should make it less obvious that he used to hero-worship her star client.

He cleared his throat. He was twenty-five, and still the sight of a pretty girl glued his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “I don’t think so.”

No, he knew so. Her name was familiar but out of reach, like a distant cousin or the great-aunt he’d forgotten about until he found out she’d died, but he was certain he’d never seen this woman in his life. He’d remember someone close to his age dressed like she’d come straight from church in a zip code he’d be run out of with a pitchfork for breathing on someone’s Bentley wrong.

He held out a hand for her to shake. “Max Sullivan. Lorelai’s new assistant. I started at the end of March.”

Delaney’s eyes flickered over his khakis and the button-down plastered to his back with Rodeo Drive power walk sweat. He didn’t need to check his reflection in the office’s wall of floor-to-ceiling windows to know his cheeks were flaming darker than her hair.

Spectacular.

She stood, and he barely managed to smother his surprise at her height. She towered over Lorelai, and he suspected her black vintage-looking heels gave her at least an inch on his five ten, too. He suppressed the urge to move closer, just to check.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he added, a beat too late to be anything but awkward.

Her grip was almost too tight as her fingers closed around his, and she let go after only a single pump of her wrist. “Likewise,” she said with a cookie-cutter smile that declared, I don’t need to care about you.

“Thanks again for waiting,” Lorelai said. “I trust we’ll speak soon.”

The last time Lorelai had thanked Max for anything was two weeks ago when he’d passed her a napkin.

The ghost of what might have been a smile in a previous life flitted across Delaney’s face. “I’m sure.”

And she marched right out the office without sparing Max a second glance, leaving a cloud of perfume in her wake. Jasmine and, underneath it, something woodsy and clean.

“This cappuccino is too wet,” Lorelai observed.

Max ripped his attention away from the empty doorway and cleared his throat. “The barista was new. I’ll make sure she gets it right tomorrow.”

Her eyebrows rose as if to say, Uh-huh. She swiveled in her chair to face her monitor. “Did the mail come?”

“I’ll check,” he said, thrilled to have something to do that didn’t involve loitering in the corner of his boss’s office like a particularly ugly piece of furniture.

“And close the door!” she called after him.

The urge to slump against it was overwhelming, and he might have, if not for the jump scare of Delaney Whoever She Was standing not even five feet away, chatting with Todd’s assistant, Emma, as if they were old friends.

So it was just him she had an issue with. Even more spectacular.

Max liked Emma, and not just because she’d been patient enough to remind him where the office manager hid the good K-Cups from the interns or how to cajole the copy machine into printing double-sided when he’d first started. After five years at Landmark, she was the closest thing the assistants had to a village elder—sweet enough to rot your molars, but ambitious, and far from shy about why she’d stuck around for so long when most assistants couldn’t get away from their agency jobs fast enough once their year was up: a promotion to junior manager that would get her off Todd’s desk and into her own office.

The similarities between their circumstances hadn’t hurt, either, but Emma could have had her pick of better positions if she wanted one. Max had accepted this job and its raise of sixty-seven cents an hour (nonnegotiable, of course, because if there was one thing Hollywood had in abundance, it was twentysomethings willing to live below the poverty line) only because he was desperate.

He slunk into his chair. Nestled at the top of his forty-eight unread emails was the subject line Lorelai’s Expense Report—URGENT CONCERN from Becky in Accounting. He groaned.

“Are you a fan, or just sucking up?”

He looked up from Becky’s bulleted list of Lorelai’s most recent Landmark T&E policy violations to find Delaney had finished her conversation with Emma and drifted over to his desk.

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

She pointed to the floating shelf behind him. Every assistant had one, and while most used them to display personal items—Emma’s was packed with pictures of her wife, Kerry, and their two cats—Max had turned his into a carefully staged diorama ripped straight from the silver screen.

“I’ve never seen a first-edition Mage in the wild before.”

You’re a Magician’s Gambit fan? he almost blurted, but he knew better than to judge. Most nerds proudly wore their fandom allegiances on their sleeve, but in the last decade, Magician’s Gambit had exploded from relatively mainstream to Literally Everywhere.

“I’ve had it for years,” he said carefully, hoping she wouldn’t ask how or why.

Her brown eyes moved from the Mage’s towering form to blonde Magdalena at his side. “You’re missing the Mage’s…Doppelgänger, or whatever he’s called.”

Blunt, this woman, but he didn’t think she was trying to be rude. And while she clearly had a good eye for collectors’ antiques, that was it. Even the most casual of Magician’s Gambit fans knew the Mage’s beleaguered shadow as the Double.

Maintaining eye contact with Delaney felt like being x-rayed, but he forced himself to hold her gaze. “He’s even more rare.”

He’d dug through hundreds of eBay listings, convention floors, and garage sales with his dad over the years, but the Double was limited to the first edition’s run and next to impossible to find for under four figures.

“So I’ve heard.” A trilling ring sounded from the depths of her bag. She fished out her phone and answered it without checking the caller ID. “I’m leaving Lorelai’s.” She listened. “I told you yesterday, it’s in my desk. Make one of the interns look, then.”

She nodded once in Max’s direction and rapped her knuckles against Emma’s desk.

“I’ll tell Kerry you say hi!” Emma said, but Delaney was already halfway across the office. She didn’t look back.

Max stared after her, feeling not unlike he’d just been sucked up by a tornado and unceremoniously dumped into a mysterious Technicolor universe with a dog in a wicker basket looped over his arm. He needed to ans. . .