"we reach the bookstore. nathan walks up beside me, where he's been so often before. before we ever kissed, before we traded pages, before the new book. before fire, thunderstorms, calmer waters. i love even our roughest draft. i love every fraught page we've rewritten to get to here. because in the end, the best part of a love story isn't having it. it's getting to keep writing it."

i LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH omg. as you can probably tell by the many updates of quotes i put on goodreads but the writing is amazing. honestly i just felt so connected to the characters in every moment and even though i've never felt what they're feeling or experienced what they have, i still felt like i understood. there were so many good quotes that gripped me and the way it was told in past+present tense changes the way you say katrina and nathan's relationship and the way it grew and broke and then rebuilt itself again. although it never really broke, because they always carried a torch for each other even in the four years they didn't speak, there's so much chemistry between them. i can't help it i'm just a sucker for a second chance romance!! i've been reading so many lately lols. also i loved that another thing this book focused on was the idea of life imitating art and how fiction and reality intertwine in so many ways and sometimes one is never really the other and sometimes it feels like there is no difference. there's just so many interesting discussions to be had about how fiction is fiction but, in a way, it's also real. as nathan said, "they're not opposites. they live within each other." also, at the back of the book where there's a little bio for the author, i read that emily wibberly and austin siegmund-broka met in high school and fell in love and now they're married and write romance books together. my heart🥲 they slayed so hard with this book, i want to read others by them now