They’ve been part of the same boisterous friend group since college, and they know that their breakup will devastate the others and make things more than a little awkward. Wyn Connor and Harriet Kilpatrick were the perfect couple-until Wyn dumped Harriet for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand.

The late return of someone from Beck’s past is nothing more than a plot device, though it strikes a discordant note in a book that aims to thoughtfully explore how sad, traumatized people learn to love and trust each other.Īn angst-y, emotional romance that explores the challenges of falling in love.Įxes pretend they’re still together for the sake of their friends on their annual summer vacation. Eliza and Beck are both sympathetic, nuanced characters, and Loren fully explores their inner lives to great effect. They agree to a friends-with-benefits arrangement, realizing it’s the only path forward since they have such different relationship goals. There is a strong attraction between the two, but Eliza wants marriage and family while Beck is determined to stay single forever. His parents were leaders of a fundamentalist Christian cult, and he abandoned his entire family after leaving the cult in his late teens. Beck encourages Eliza to detox from social media and the dating apps that make her feel like a failure, but he struggles to reveal his own feelings of failure about his past. Beck is a cybersecurity expert with zero presence on social media, and he invites Eliza to join him at a “NoPho” party, where his large group of friends get together to focus on the people in the room, with no phones allowed. She spontaneously asks him to join her at the dog shelter, and a friendship is born. When she stops at her office to do some paperwork first, she finds Beckham Carter, the cute younger guy in the office next door, also alone and working on the holiday. Grieving over the loss of both parents in a car accident two years ago and feeling like a failure for being single at 32, she decides to adopt a dog on Christmas Day. A therapist and a cybersecurity expert who are neighbors in a coworking building agree to a friends-with-benefits arrangement.Įliza Catalano loves her job as a therapist, but she struggles to manage her own feelings.

What If You & Me by Roni Loren