Beach Read

by Emily Henry

I HAVE A FATAL flaw. I like to think we all do. Or at least that makes it easier for me when I’m writing—building my heroines and heroes up around this one self-sabotaging trait, hinging everything that happens to them on a specific characteristic: the thing they learned to do to protect themselves and can’t let go of, even when it stops serving them.

“Besides, you know how scheduling off is in the industry. I’m lucky my boss said I could have Fourth of July. For all I know, he’s expecting a blow job now.” “No way. Blow jobs are for major holidays. What you’ve got on your hands is a good old-fashioned foot job quid pro quo.”

Here’s the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if you believe in them. Here’s the thing about me: I did until the day of my father’s funeral.

Anya had a reputation for being tough, a bulldog, on the publishers’ end of things, but on the writers’ end, she was something like Miss Honey, the sweet teacher from Matilda, mashed together with a sexy witch.

“Life is pretty much a series of good and bad moments right up until the moment you die,” he said stiffly. “Which is arguably a bad one.

Love doesn’t change that. I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. Besides, can you think of a single real-life romance that actually ended like Bridget fucking Jones?”

“What?” “Promise not to fall in love with me.” “Oh my God!” I shoved his shoulder and flopped back into my seat, laughing. “Are you slightly misquoting A Walk to Remember at me?”

Mom’s first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope, but it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.

Careless about sunblock and addicted to every form of potatoes.

The last year of my life had proven that. I could plot all day, but it didn’t matter if I didn’t fall into the story headfirst, if the story itself didn’t spin like a cyclone, pulling me wholly into itself. That was what I’d always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

Dad loved his space, but he also always said he liked to be reminded that there were other people out there, living their lives.

I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.

thought—think it’s brave to believe in love. I mean, the lasting kind. To try for that, even knowing it can hurt you.”

That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”

Gus and I had that intoxicating rapid-release form of friendship usually reserved for sleepaway camps and orientation week of college, but Shadi and I had years of history.

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “… you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but … I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”

If you think the story has a sad ending, it’s because it’s not over yet.

“Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”

Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.”

For January, I don’t care how the story ends as long as I spend it with you.

It was just another good day. A perfect day. A happy-for-now, so vast and deep that I knew—or rather believed—I didn’t have to worry about tomorrow.